[Ads-l] "Anglofan"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

This will only be of interest to (I think) two people on this list, but I figured I'd share it anyway....

I was looking into _Anglofan_, a somewhat marginal term in SF fandom for a British SF fan. It's not in the original Fancyclopedia (1944), but was added to Fancyclopedia II (1959), an entry carried over in the current web version: http://fancyclopedia.org/Anglofan . There's no dating info for the term, however.

There are only a smattering of examples in the Internet Archive, mostly from the 1950s. There aren't even that many entries in fanac.org, though the indexing isn't great so there could be more. The earliest is apparently from 1944.

One of the entries there is to a 1944 index of the FAPA mailings:

http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/FAPA_Mailings/FAPA3007.pdf

This indicates that FAPA 18, from December 1941, included an item titled "Open Letter to Anglofans", so this would be citable as "1941 in... (1944)". It would be best to convert this, but unfortunately, fanac.org only has copies of the FAPA mailings from FAPA 20 onwards. Hmm.

After a bunch of digging around, I discovered that the Coslet-Sapienza Fantasy and Science Fiction Fanzine Collection at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County indexes FAPA 18, and also indexes this purported Open Letter to Anglofans, although says it's from FAPA 26; there are other dating discrepancies as well. I was able to get a librarian there to find a copy of the document, though, and in fact the 1944 index is correct: the letter is real, it was dated 1 Sept. 1941 and sent in FAPA 18 in December 1941. And it's not too much of surprise that it was written by Forrest J. Ackerman.

So, 1 Sept. 1941 is the best I've been able to find for this.

Jesse Sheidlower

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