L.A. has one of the oldest and strongest sf fandoms. The prominent Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society call themselves “the world’s oldest continuously-running science fiction and fantasy club.” They are a remainder, perhaps the last chapter, of the Science Fiction League, a now long-defunct “correspondence club” established by Hugo Gernsback in 1934 when he edited the pulp magazine Wonder Stories. When Gernsback’s League faltered, LASFS (pronounced “LAS-FAS”) was born. They still have weekly meetings, put on a yearly convention called LOSCON, and have run WorldCons in L.A. Special collections boasts a number of early zines straight out of L.A. fandom.
Where is the line between a pulp and a zine? Pulps are cheaply made from “pulp” paper, and low-paying…but they are professional markets. Zines are passion projects. Unusual Stories and Marvel Tales, all edited by LASFAS member William Crawford, come out of our pulp archives, not our zine collection. But Unusual Stories is non-paying and Marvel Tales perhaps a semiprozine. (You can see that Marvel Tales No. 2 is cheaply bound with staples, like a zine.) Still, Crawford commissioned work for these publications by important writers like Clifford Simak and H.P. Lovecraft. Crawford established one of the first small press genre publishers, Fantasy Publications. SF small presses are (like zines) marked by passion over profit and (also like zines) are extremely important to the growth of the genre.
Published in Los Angeles, edited by Sam Sackett and Stewart Kemble, Fantastic Worlds is a zine that managed to pull in big name authors, with early work by Robert Silverberg or, here, an article on horror in film, “Calling Dr. Caligari,” by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho.
This zine is the LASFS monthly newsletter, De Profundis, named for the club motto, De Profundis ad Astra ("From the Depths to the Stars"). Zines passed information in many such sf (and other) club newsletters before the internet replaced their function.
Fantasiae was the monthly newsletter of The Fantasy Association, a group based in L.A. With the rise of Tolkien fandom in the 1960s, fantasy joins sf as a major commercial genre. Fantasiae responds to fantasy’s growth by publishing articles by leading professionals. This issue has Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn, with his essay, “Gramarye,” offering important commentary developing an emerging genre.