OTW Fannews: Commercial Weirdness

A post at Wired featured images from a new book on science fiction zines of the 1940s through 1960s. "Despite being produced with a limited tool set, and existing in a vastly different milieu, these hacked-together pamphlets laid the groundwork for modern day fandoms. 'The most surprising thing I noticed about the zines was how closely the format—editorials, letters, essays, reviews—paralleled the format of blogs,' says co-author Jack Womack. 'All this stuff is proto-blog, proto-Instagram, proto-snark, proto-troll, and naturally, also an active exchange of ideas that motivated some very weird people to do great things in their life,' adds co-author Johan Kugelberg."