Previous Page 
|
|
Monthly Bundle Sample, Leather or Prunella 10, February 2000, p.3 
Some of you undoubtedly recall Bob Lichtman as a member of NAPA in
the early sixties. Bob (P.O. Box 30, Glen Ellen, CA 95442) is still
active in the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA) founded by
Donald Wollheim and others in 1937. He is recovering from injuries
suffered in an automobile accident last year. I know Bob from my
own period in FAPA from about 1976 to 1991.
Danner is the last of a line of fandom printers beginning with Charles D. Hornig (The Fantasy Fan) in the 1930s. Most fans could not afford printing presses and used hectographs, spirit duplicators, mimeographs or even just carbon paper. But a few, like many amateur journalists of the same era, were printers. Like Tryout Smith, Bill Danner kept printing into his nineties, and fortunately we still have him with us. On a sadder note, one must note the death in March 1999 of Claire Beck, 79, one of the proprietors, with his brothers Groo and Clyde, of The Futile Press of Lakeport, California. The Becks' Science Fiction Critic was probably the first creditable "sercon" magazine devoted to the science fiction field. They also printed the first edition (only seventy-five copies) of Howard P. Lovecraft's Notes and Commonplace Book in 1938. THOSE STRANGE LINES IN LEATHER OR PRUNELLA #9 Shortly after I picked up my copies of the last issue from Kinko's Copies here in Glenview, I noticed that my copies contained a distortionÄon each half-page there was one line of text blown up from its original 10-point height to about 14-point height. The deadline was near, so decided to fold my copies and to send them off to our mailer. For that, I apologize both to the NAPAns and to the Gissing scholars who saw the last issue.The defect is not contained in my original paste-up. Let me explain: I produce Leather or Prunella using Wordperfect 5.0 software with Facelift fonts. I take my four pages and paste them up on both sides of a single sheet so that they can be folded as a brochure. There's a fair amount of artist's tape on each side of the sheet although with practice I have learned to be more economical. Fellow NAPAn Jim Jackson noticed this defect and wrote to me about it. As it so happened, I had business at Kinko's Copies shortly after I received Jim's letter, so I took my original paste-up in to the store, along with the photocopy of my final product which Jim had sent to me. Regrettably, the manager was not on duty, but the staff member on duty theorized that the heavy tape on my paste-up caused the original to fail to sit evenly on the copier paten, thereby producing the distortion. What I still don't understand is this: if this explanation is correct, I would have expected wavy distortion throughout the text. Instead what I got was one line on each half of each side of the paste-up increased in size. On the final page of this issue, I include at the top a sample portion of my final product and on the bottom the same portion of my original paste-up. It seems to me that the third line above the magnified line in this sample page is truncated in height but I am not sure. Certainly, this defect is less noticeable than the line which is increased in height. I still believe the copier must have been operating in some type of autocorrection mode to produce this strange result. Does anyone have an explanation?—KWF.
|