Fantasy Fan of 1945

Text:

1945 Fan Journalist

The Role of the F.A.P.A.

By Donald A. Wolheim

A new fan might easily find certain confusion in his first contact with the organization referred to enigmatically, as FAPA. He'll see it mentioned – but no one will contact him and try to make him join. He'll hear of intriguing fan magazine titles which he'll never encounter in the ads in the fan mags he gets, or in the reviews of Startling Stories. Finally he'll track down something definite on an officer of the organization, and write, asking to join. He'll send a rebuff in the form of being politely told that he'd have to wait maybe a year or more before he could be considered for membership, and besides, they’d want to know who he was, and what made him think he was good enough to join.

So what is this organization, the Fantasy Amateur Press Association? What does it do? How did it come about? Let me try to reconstruct the scene that called for the formation of the group. In that way, its purpose will also become understandable.

Fan magazines didn't develope {sic} in a big way until about 1936. There had been fan magazines published before that - - but with only very few exceptions, they had been the official organs of clubs. Remember that organized fandom never existed prior to late 1929, that any sort of developed fan clubs didn't really grow in any number until 1934. Before that, there were the scienceers in New York, and the first International Scientific Association in the U.S., but they were pioneers, experiments, gropings in the dark. Several members of the Scienceers had the idea of bringing out a fan magazine to sell to stf {scientifiction} readers as a commercial idea. Edited by A;;en Glaser, it was entitled The Time Traveler. It ws not the official organ of the club. It was not the organ of anything. It was a fan magazine, pure and unattached. There was a split in friendship among those who were putting out the Time Traveler, about its seventh or eighth issue. {… the rest of the text unavailable}