Library receives coveted Pelz collection

The science fiction fanzine was the pre-Internet version of the chatroom.

It brought fans of the genre together on an equal footing with the writers, filmmakers and with interested scientists to discuss the merits of a work, develop ideas for new worlds, discuss a topic or engage in social critiques.

Those fan-club newsletters, which got their start in the 1920s, were usually written, published and circulated by small tightly knit groups of about 15 to 20 fans. In their mimeographed, usually stapled, pages were ongoing discussions, diatribes and dialogues among fans, the writers of the genre and the scientists who knew of, were developing or dreaming of the technologies being written about.

The fanzine erupted in popularity during the Great Depression as a cheap source of entertainment. With access to a mimeograph machine, some paper and staples or glue, a group of people could carry on an ongoing conversation, review books and dream.

The richness of that world has been largely lost and it has been through the efforts of the fans themselves that the fanzine survives in some form. Most have now given way to the Internet discussion boards or chatrooms. One such fan/conservator was Bruce Pelz a former UCLA librarian, ardent science fiction fan and fanzine collector who died in May at age 65.

For many years, his sizeable collection, estimated at more than 200,000 fanzines, were the focus of acquisition efforts by fans, collectors, private and public libraries - among them the University of California, Riverside Library.

"When word got out that Bruce, the top fanzine man in the country, was looking to let go of his collection, we had to scramble to compete with a number of fans - wealthy fans - who went after it," said George Slusser, curator of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Utopia, and a professor of comparative literature. "We just didn't have the wherewithal to compete head to head, money-wise, so there had to be some other reason for Bruce to leave us his collection."

When the Special Collections staff landed the gift, considered priceless as a cultural heritage, and with an estimated value of about $750,000 on the collectible markets, it was a coup. But it was a success that took some time in coming. Pelz had announced his intent to part with his collection several years ago.

"Bruce had told me of his intentions to give the collection to UC Riverside during the 1999 Eaton conference because, according to him, here it would make the greatest impact on the scholarly world," he said.

Ultimately, it was the Eaton Collection's reputation, and that of its namesake annual conferences, that won the day for the campus.

The Eaton collection, part of Special Collections, is the world's largest cataloged collection of materials in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian literature. It covers the genres from 1675 to the present. It contains 80,000 volumes, and many thousands of issues, with hundreds of titles, of science fiction and fantasy magazines, thousands of comic books, graphic novels, and the literary papers of some of the world's great science fiction writers, like Anne McCaffrey, Robert Forward and Gregory Benford. It also already included about 45,000 issues of fanzines when Pelz made his donation.

The Eaton Collection started in 1969 with the acquisition of 7,500 rare and unusual science fiction hardbacks from J. Lloyd Eaton, a private collector in Oakland. The university has, since then, either purchased or received donations from other collections. In mid-August, when the Pelz collection arrived in hundreds of boxes and some 20 filing cabinets, some cataloged, most not, it quickly occupied an entire wall, from floor to ceiling, in the Special Collections on the fourth floor of the Tomas Rivera Library building.

Today the challenge for the Special Collections staff lies not in acquiring the collection, but now in cataloguing and preserving the vast collection.

"The problem for a curator or librarian is how do you guide scholars through this," Slusser shrugged. "There are no chapters, no verses, no volumes, no books. It's going to constitute a change in the way we look at each bound piece."

Then there's the poor quality of the paper, the ink and the binding, all of which make the job of preservation daunting.

Slusser said interested fans and students could help the university bolster its preservation and cataloging efforts.

The irony of the importance of science fiction as a literary genre today is not lost on the man who, as a boy, was fascinated with other worlds, but who would not dare bring the subject up during his undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral studies.

"It was pretty much pooh-poohed as being unworthy of serious study," said Slusser of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Today, science fiction is the subject of many a doctoral dissertation and the catalyst of a growing number of courses melding the humanities with the sciences. Science fiction has always been on the cutting edge of both technology and social issues because it delves into how humans react to change and challenge.

In their heyday, fanzines with titles such as "Squeegee," "Stapled Loose Leaf," "Chaos," and "Cartoonzine," questioned the conventions of the times and the limits of technology. And long before TV shows such as "The X-Files," fanzines frequently offered weird, twisted paths toward "the truth" and questioned the motives of the government.

And if science fiction is the natural bridge between the scientific and the artistic, the fanzine was the natural bridge between the fans and the writers of the genre.

The Pelz collection is a tremendous boost to the value of a collection already considered world class by scholars from across the nation and around the world who come to Riverside to study the holdings at the Eaton Collection.

"This collection of fanzines is the stuff of future scholarship," said Slusser. "I probably won't get to it in my lifetime."