Taral informs me he is busy scanning CENSORED #5 from 1948 and will send it to me shortly. Huzzah! Then the site will host 3 out of the 6 issues produced. Fantastic. Anybody have the other three (#1,3,6) and willing to scan?

Looking through the two issues already posted, now I understand why Forrest J. Ackerman accused Barbara Bovard of being Leslie A. Croutch in disguise. They share the same lowbrow, rather crude (though rarely rude) puerile sense of humour. Almost indistinguishable in fact. Lest modern readers turn up their nose, I consider their columns, japes and jests to be a sort of historical artifact reflecting the typical humour of young fen in the 1940s, and valuable evidence for what fandom was like back then.

Alas, as a fan historian I wish the contributors had spent more time writing about each other and themselves rather than ‘timeless’ humour columns. Not to mention, writing articles about contemporary fandom rather than printing fiction. But tis a fact many zines in that era were still hung up on the idea of imitating prozines (a big fad in the 30s and slowly fading in the 40s).

It must have been sad for Nils Helmer Frome to see one of his art pieces reproduced in CENSORED but have to read in the same issue Fred Hurter Jr. grudgingly admitting that Croutch’s publications predated CENSORED as ‘the first’ Canadian fanmag when in truth Frome’s SUPRAMUNDANE STORIES had been the first (#1-1937, #2-1938) to make a big splash. It does seem that Frome’s role as a faned was unknown to fellow Canadian fen within 3 or 4 years of his last issue. He seems to have been viewed as a fan artist, writer, and loccer, but SUPRAMUNDANE COMPLETELY forgotten, if they ever knew about it in the first place. Sad.

Also somewhat sad, I’m getting about 12 spams a day and zero comments. Oh well. I prefer to imagine all of you are too busy reading and researching the zines for your own pleasure to make any comments. This is the sort of site I always dreamed of having access to, and now I’m in the position to create it for others. Great fun actually.

But what I do hope will happen is that those of you with rare early Canadian fanzines in your collection will offer to scan them and send me the pdfs so that I can post them and make them available to all who may be interested. That would please me very much.

Cheers!  The Graeme