WESTERCON 63: CONFIRMATION
CONCHORD 23
Fan Guest of Honor
John D. Berry
Picture © 2007 Dennis Letbetter
I am an editor, typographer, and book designer; I write and speak frequently about typography and design, and you can find my professional references on my website. A surprising amount of what I do professionally has grown out of my early experience publishing fanzines.I published my first fanzine when I was eleven; by my late teens I had learned to publish fanzines that might possibly be worth reading. I had also learned the value of community, one not bounded by my immediate physical environs. At the same time, the hands-on nature of publishing a fanzine focused my natural predilection for playing with form and content together, not thinking of them as separate things. This combination has been central to my professional life.
Fandom, as I found it in the mid-1960s, was a unique kind of dispersed village. The core of science fiction fandom, the couple of hundred people who published fanzines for each other, formed a community that felt very local, despite the distances that might separate individuals. It was communication through the mail, with occasional gatherings face-to-face at conventions or in big-city clubs or parties. It was a community where you knew everyone, or at least knew of them. In that sense it was almost tribal. At the same time, it was a community based entirely on what you said and wrote; without really knowing it, the people who created fanzine fandom were making up a template for dispersed communities, one that would later prove extremely adaptable to the world of e-mail and the Web, with digitally-based communities all around the world.
I found my experience with the personal and interactive nature of fanzines particularly useful in 1998, when I was asked to start a web-based sister publication for the well-known graphic-design magazine U&lc. In creating U&lc Online, I gave it an inclusive, informal tone of voice, and I used the principal of "news, views, and reviews" that had been promulgated by the publishers of fannish newszines, only for a wider professional community.
As a book designer and an editorial designer, I've taken my craft well beyond the mimeographed fanzines that I published in my twenties; but the lessons I learned from that experience, about how to integrate design and content, and how to interact with your readers, have been at the base of my professional practice. It's all a continuum.
I have the usual ambivalent feelings about science fiction fandom that anyone has who grew up in it. It drives you crazy at times, and at other times you want to get as far away from it as you can; yet it's a milieu that, for all its excesses and its occasional fascination with its own bellybutton, has been uniquely creative, with a continuity that transcends time and space in ways that may well prove useful as a model for the displaced, malleable cultures of the future. In that sense, for all its intensely parochial focus, and its endemic social awkwardness, fandom sets a surprising standard for one possible way forward - for, to be perfectly melodramatic about it, the world of the future.
See his blog for more fun: www.johndberry.com