Hello and welcome to
Florida Fandom on Line. Florida Fandom has been around since
1976 as a Fanzine. We have stayed with the times as well as
we could. When we started we woudl type up articles on an
electric typewriter and then cut and pasted them together, using rubber
cement, making the zine, and adding press type for the title and
pasting on the original artwork. We would then take the paste up to a
printer and have it printed off-set. We latter
moved to a computer to type it up on, but we still had to cut and paste
to put it together and instead of orignal artwork, we could use photo
copies of the artwork. Titles could also be made with the
computer. At about this time we changed form off-set printing
to the then much cheaper photocopies. (They had dropped from over 25¢
for a one side fuzzy copy to about 7¢ for a two sided sharp copy).
Computers and their programs got better and we were able to
put together the entire issue on the computer. And in 1996 we
went the next step - an online version. Our hopes were for an
ever growing site - keeping the orginal departments from teh zine and
adding a few more. We are updating this in April 2011 almost 35 years
after Florida Fandom started. October will mark 35 years
since issue #1 cmae out (we had an issue zero come out in August of
1996). This is part of a year long celebration of our 35th
year...with a new print issue coming out in October, the first in
almost 15 years. We are revamping the website, more than once so far.
And we now have a Facebook
Page.
Now a little bit about Florida Fandom and how it started.
Back in 1976 Ruth and I wanted to start a Florida based
fanzine being both for and about Florida fans. Having been
introduced to Fanzines by John Ellis (of Star Trek Federation of Fans)
adn having co-editied with John many fo teh STFF newszine Tholian
Registry, I was ready to start. After a few issue we realized
that the zine was for more than just Florida fans, as we had readers
and contaaributers form all over the country. Most copies
were giben away free in exchange for other zines, artwork and articles.
This was sort of an early version of the internet except we
depended on snail mail to stay in touch. We never changed the
name because by this time everyone knew us as Florida Fandom.
Today we live in the mountains of Tennessee and we still are
keeping our original name: Florida Fandom.
