War and Science Fiction is a modest item, two sheets of paper that have been bent in half, printed with a stencil machine or mimeograph, and stapled. It contains an argument against the US entering WW2 by a young Don Wollheim with the point that the price of printing magazines and fanzines would increase prohibitively if the country were to do so. Wollheim would have been about 21 at the time, and to some extent this little screed prefaces his long career as a publisher of inexpensive science fiction, first through establishing the Fantasy Amateur Press Association in 1937 (a loose conglomeration of fanzine exchange), then later working as an acquiring editor for Ace Books and eventually founding his own company, DAW Books in 1971. DAW remains one of the big paperback publishers of science fiction to this day.
I've been collecting fanzines since I was a teenager, first my interest in my favorite media series like Star Trek and Highlander, and then growing wider as I became interested in the history of fandom and science fiction. This piece is the oldest in my collection by far, but there's a number of things that I like about it. It is of course a bit fragile, printed on the 8.5x11" sheets that prefaced modern computer paper, with its pair of rusty staples intact. This is an item that, quite simply, was not expected nor even meant to last this long. Like so much of science fiction fandom history, it is ephemeral, poor quality materials that are an accident of circumstance and luck. I bought it through happenstance for $10 a number of years ago, because fanzines are ephemeral, with comparatively little cultural capital even today, and most dealers simply aren't interested in selling them, so one acquires them through other fans most of the time.
Science fiction fanzines are held in a handful of institutional libraries because of the combination of preservational challenges and low cultural capital they encompass. That said, they are treasure troves of publishing history as well as genre history, and are currently undergoing a resurgence of print in the age of digital anxiety and cheap printing. It's an accident that War and Science Fiction survived, but it's not an accident that Wollheim would make the jump from science fiction fan to science fiction author and publisher.
by Cait Coker
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