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Centauri, issue 4, Summer 1945
Page 8
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Page 8 The Unnamed separate file by such fans as are interested in books and book collecting. Originally devised by J. Michael Rosenblum, the plan is extremely simple. When you write a book review for publication in a fanzine, you put at the top of the page the essentials, like the name of author, pseudonym if any, name of book, and so forth. You skip a line, type "Further information", and write there anything you happen to know about the various editions of the book, whether its content ever appeared in magazine form, whether it had both American and British editions, and so forth. If you know nothing of all this, you merely leave five or six lines blank; the more ardent bibliophiles among us will dig up that information later on. Then you write your review, being careful to include a brief description of the plot and critical commentary, the two essential parts of any book review worth its salt, and you keep the whole thing within the limits of one typed 8 1/2X11 page. (Naturally, sometimes this won't work, if you are so interested in the book that you want to discuss it for several thousand words ---- but you'll find that the vast majority of book reviews that have appeared in fanzines during the last five years are close enough to a page in length that they could easily have been converted into this form.) The purpose behind all this? Well, the person who publishes the review --- yourself or some other fanzine editor --- will save the stencil, and eventually run off on white paper a quantity of extra copies of the review. They will be distributed from a central point to all fans interested enough in books to want to keep a review file. Final details of the distribution process, and certain technical matters of the reviews' "format" are now being cleared up, and should be getting publicity elsewhere before long. There is no reason why 300 of these loose-leaf bibliographical sheets should have been published by the end of 1945 -- fans in England as well as in this country are intensely interested -- and after another year or two of progress, an excellent basic bibliography of book form fantasy should be on hand. It will need, however, the cooperation of a lot of fans, both from the writing and publishing standpoint. So, when you next feel inspired to write a book review of a volume you may have read a week or ten years ago, do your review in this form, won't you? You will have no trouble finding a fanzine to publish it, or you may, if you like, send the ms. to Langley Searles or myself, and we'll take care of the publication angle. If you are intensely interested and want to enter it in a big way, pick out a certain writer or subject in which you've delved deep, and do a whole set of reviews, one to a book. A Burroughs fiend, for instance, could assure immortality as a fan by writing the necessary 40 or 50 reviews of the Burroughs fantasies; if you are on a higher aesthetic plane, doing same for Cabell's books would be a fine achievement. A warning to collectors! Buy your prozines now, or suffer eternal holes in your collections! The warning is prompted by musings over the sad state to which the prozine field has degenerated, what with only one monthly and a couple of bi-monthlies now appearing. It seems so easy to -- Continued to Page 12 --
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Page 8 The Unnamed separate file by such fans as are interested in books and book collecting. Originally devised by J. Michael Rosenblum, the plan is extremely simple. When you write a book review for publication in a fanzine, you put at the top of the page the essentials, like the name of author, pseudonym if any, name of book, and so forth. You skip a line, type "Further information", and write there anything you happen to know about the various editions of the book, whether its content ever appeared in magazine form, whether it had both American and British editions, and so forth. If you know nothing of all this, you merely leave five or six lines blank; the more ardent bibliophiles among us will dig up that information later on. Then you write your review, being careful to include a brief description of the plot and critical commentary, the two essential parts of any book review worth its salt, and you keep the whole thing within the limits of one typed 8 1/2X11 page. (Naturally, sometimes this won't work, if you are so interested in the book that you want to discuss it for several thousand words ---- but you'll find that the vast majority of book reviews that have appeared in fanzines during the last five years are close enough to a page in length that they could easily have been converted into this form.) The purpose behind all this? Well, the person who publishes the review --- yourself or some other fanzine editor --- will save the stencil, and eventually run off on white paper a quantity of extra copies of the review. They will be distributed from a central point to all fans interested enough in books to want to keep a review file. Final details of the distribution process, and certain technical matters of the reviews' "format" are now being cleared up, and should be getting publicity elsewhere before long. There is no reason why 300 of these loose-leaf bibliographical sheets should have been published by the end of 1945 -- fans in England as well as in this country are intensely interested -- and after another year or two of progress, an excellent basic bibliography of book form fantasy should be on hand. It will need, however, the cooperation of a lot of fans, both from the writing and publishing standpoint. So, when you next feel inspired to write a book review of a volume you may have read a week or ten years ago, do your review in this form, won't you? You will have no trouble finding a fanzine to publish it, or you may, if you like, send the ms. to Langley Searles or myself, and we'll take care of the publication angle. If you are intensely interested and want to enter it in a big way, pick out a certain writer or subject in which you've delved deep, and do a whole set of reviews, one to a book. A Burroughs fiend, for instance, could assure immortality as a fan by writing the necessary 40 or 50 reviews of the Burroughs fantasies; if you are on a higher aesthetic plane, doing same for Cabell's books would be a fine achievement. A warning to collectors! Buy your prozines now, or suffer eternal holes in your collections! The warning is prompted by musings over the sad state to which the prozine field has degenerated, what with only one monthly and a couple of bi-monthlies now appearing. It seems so easy to -- Continued to Page 12 --
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