This article first appeared in FANG Vol. 1 in 2005.
There was once a time, just between the rise of the fast-food, fast-everything economy in the West in the seventies and the flourishing of the modern Internet in the ‘90s, when the distribution of one’s art through amateur media was possible, although it wasn’t easy. The availability of small-press printing methods, not to mention photocopiers and stencil machines, made it possible for individuals to make magazines in moderate quantities – with the assumption, of course, that they’d fill this magazine with interesting material.
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Non-professional art and literature enthusiasts found in these technologies a great opportunity to distribute their work to an audience, if they had one, but the most interesting use of these technologies was the way they were employed by artists and writers amongst themselves.
Amateur journalists, political activists, scientists, artists, connoisseurs, writers – amateurs, all, in the original sense of the word: people with a love for a craft that have no hope of recognition or money or fame. Or rather, they have hope, but that isn’t why they practice their craft, be it reporting or drawing or writing,. It was these people who were suddenly given by the world at large the technology and infrastructure to, for the first time, overcome the boundaries of geography and form communities based on the sharing of their work.
The Amateur Press Association or APA was formed and was one of the expressions of the ‘commons’ principle which is now ever more making its way into the digital realm. A ‘commons’ is a resource of limited availability which must be managed or risk total depletion. Examples are the file-sharing networks so popular these days, Bittorrent, Emule and others, where a single user uploads a file to a small number of other users who, by virtue of the software they use, automatically distribute the portions they have received to other users.
APA’s functioned in a similar manner. An APA consisted of a limited number of artists or writers of like mind and disposition, typically between ten and forty, with a number of rules that governed membership. All members were obligated to produce a mininum number of works per time period, of a quality that honored that of other members’ works. Each member was obligated to manufacture one copy of their work for each of the APA’s members and mail these out to all of them and in return he or she would receive a copy of each of the other members’ works. Such a group could survive without leadership as long as the group’s members could enforce the rules.
Sometimes an APA would have a leader, typically the person who erected the group to begin with. In such cases, members would manufacture copies o their work, but rather than sending these individually to the other members, they would send them to the APA’s leader, who would then bind one copy of each submission together, give it a cover, and mail this magazine-like bundle of works out to the other members periodically. Such closed-circle publications were called APA ‘zines.
The term ‘zine which, since it contains an apostrophe in itself, I haven’t given quote marks, comes not from ‘magazine’ but from ‘fanzine’. Fanzines were amateur magazines printed through modern means of reproduction such as the aforementioned photocopiers or stencil machines, run by amateurs and contributed to by amateurs. They operated in that blessed space within copyright law that is governed by common sense, a space which has been more and more marginalized here in the west, and while few now still function they were very similar to the doujinshi of Japan. These, like the fanzines of yesteryear, are magazines by amateurs dedicated to a television series, a film, a book or a fictional world where amateurs would write stories or articles and draw art or comics set within the setting of the series, book, or film, sometimes making use of that setting’s characters.
The difference between a fanzine and an APA is that a fanzine has editors who decide whether or not a submitted work is printed and that a fanzine is available to the general public. Anyone can buy one or subscribe to one, while an APA is available only to contributors.
“Video killed the radio show” and the Internet had a significant impact on fanzines and in particular APA’s because now there were even better reproduction technologies available to the public. In particular, the reproduction of information in the form of digital data has no monetary cost, takes almost no time and no effort on the part of the originator and the quality of the work can be much higher than the blotchy, crude-paper reproductions that APA’s and fanzines typically were. Why pay for good money to reproduce your works and mail them out to others when you can simply put up a website and let anybody read it from there? Why accept the limitations of membership for an APA when you can read anyone’s work form their website?
The Internet offered a far cheaper, faster and more flexible way for communities of amateurs to form and as its use became more widespread, especially with the advent of the now ubiquitous World Wide Web, fewer and fewer APA contributors saw any reason to continue contributing to a slow and expensive community. Fanzines weren’t affected as severely, some of them transforming to strive for higher production values and became far more like magazines – but on the whole, fanzines were supplanted by fansites.
Time has worn on. APA’s have all but died out, fanzines have been decimated, many of them struggling for survival. The Internet is abuzz with healthy, thriving communities, webrings and chat rooms and countless other means by which enthusiasts and amateurs are distributing their work and more and more Internet users are becoming jaded and bored with the truly limitless material that is available to them and the fact that, like so much in the real world, ninety percent of it is rubbish.
Books weren’t marginalized by the Internet any more than film replaced theatre or video killed cinemas and television stations. This is because people have material desires as well as intangible ones, when it comes to things like art and writing and movies; a DivX movie downloaded from KazaA is the same movie that’s playing in your local theatre, it’s more convenient because it’s right here, in your room, there isn’t anyone talking and you can pause it to go to the bathroom. Not to mention that it’s free. But having to pick up your friends and drive to the cinema, make sure you’re on time, stand in line to buy your ticket and to buy some drinks and snacks – even aside from the huge screen and the vastly better sound system (usually), merely these inconveniences add to the experience of going to see a movie.
Convenience can deflate an experience, while the right kinds of inconvenience can enhance it, making the experience more rare and more exciting as well as more valuable simply because you had to work harder for it. Having to turn a page in a book or magazine instead of scrolling down means it takes a heartbeat longer to continue reading, extending that delicious thrill of curiosity just a little longer.
Conversely, some material aspects of old-fashioned media are better than their mechanical or digital counterpart. Pictures look better on high-quality paper with good inks than they do on a computer monitor and they look better on a well-designed page than on a screen cluttered with not just a website, but toolbars and menu bars and other open windows. A book is light and you can make notes in it, should you be so inclined, with any old pen or pencil and you can read it in places where electronics are unavailable, impractical or undesirable. If you’re going on a camping trip to enjoy the great outdoors and escape from hurried city life for a change, then five gets you ten that you’ll prefer taking a book to read by the campfire than a PDA with a battery pack.
Now that the initial excitement about the Global Village and the enormous possibilities of the electronic society have been gradually fading, a renewed sense of material appreciation has been evolving. Book sales have increased and despite the clamorings to the contrary of the music industry, so have CD sales – not to mention vinyl. The modern man and woman are realizing that while the digital world is enormously useful it has different material properties .
Video and film, for instance. Video, be it DV or Hi8 is much more practical, can be used with more compact, less mechanically fragile cameras and is far easier and cheaper to reproduce and distribute. Early video, admittedly, lacked the light and color response of the more expensive types of celluloid-based film, but it also lacked the irritating frame stutter, producing much smoother images. But people didn’t want smoother images. They were accustomed to the flicker of cinema screens and this had become such a part of the film experience that modern day films, be they digitally recorded like the sensationally beautiful Vidocq or even fully-digital films like Shrek and Finding Nemo, eschew the smooth image that digital technologies allow them and artificially simulate the stuttering image artifacts audiences know and love.
Similarly, even if there should be a device whose reflectivity and contrast should exactly match that of paper and it were about the same size as a book and had an infinitely long battery life and could render all of a book’s pages on its screen, or two screens, displaying the next pages at the push of a button, indeed, able to contain or access every book in the world for the user to select – even so it wouldn’t live up to what makes a good old-fashioned book such a delight, not to this editor and not, most likely, to you, gentle reader.
We like books because we have to flip the pages and because keeping them scuffle-free is an effort that reflects how much we love them, we like not having every book in one device and instead having to have a separate book for every novel.
So what you now hold in your hand, gentle reader, is the furry fiction community’s humble response to this re-emancipation of the analogue, this desire to find a balance between the old and the new and value each appropriately. While it’s certainly true that a substantial part of FANG’s modest proceeds go toward the fees of the authors whose work is printed, FANG isn’t a paperback edition of what would effectively be a pay-site where your subscription money goes toward the artists who contribute to it. The lion’s share of this book’s price went to the printing of it.
FANG is more expensive to produce, per copy, because it isn’t printed in volume. Rather, it employs a more modern model of production involving the use of digital printing technologies which, for the first time since the invention of the printing press, make the printing of two different books just as expensive as printing two the same books. Traditional printing presses, making use of metal or paper printing plates, need a substantial initial investment before a copy can be printed, but after that, each copy only adds a very small increment to the total production costs. For example, one could print two hundred copies of a book at only twice the price of printing twenty.
This means that anyone can print a paperback, and anyone could invite furry authors to submit their work for paid inclusion in an anthology published in this fashion. Everyone had the technology and opportunity at their very fingertips, but no-one was doing anything.
This did not sit well with the editor. And when things don’t sit well with this editor, he wants them fixed – which makes him a good editor. He will politely bully authors into improving their work and if he spots a spelling or grammar error so simple that it would take more effort to mail the author and get him to change it, he’ll fix it himself.
The dearth of furry fiction publications in paperback format was one such problem he decided could be most easily fixed by doing it himself. Between the availability of digital printing technology, his street cred as the author of the long-running series (and near-future paperback) gay crime serial Maranatha and the patience, honesty and professionalism he’s built up over years of teaching and some theatre before that – he had everything at his disposal to make FANG happen.
And so the quality control of the APA, the public availability of the fanzine and the luxury of printed books have been combined into this publication, which will hopefully scratch an itch with many a fur whose enjoyment of the community’s fiction has been hampered by the glare of the screen or the noise of the printer.
The APA may be largely dead and the fanzine may be struggling for survival, but this format has far less competition from the Internet, because its limitations are a feature, which the readers desire. It is this editor’s humble hope that it will continue to be a source of enjoyment for its readers and a source of pride for its authors for many, many issues to come.
