When Dice Were Made of Flint #7

If print magazines like White Dwarf and Imagine were the establishment side of hobby gaming in the 70s and 80s, then fanzines were the independent press. If you were a gamer with strong opinions or material to showcase, a fanzine was your soapbox.

Making a fanzine was a lot more work than posting on a blog. First, you had to type your thoughts onto a piece of paper, using a manual or electric typewriter. “Cut and paste” was done with actual scissors and actual glue, setting up A4 sheets with two pages of text on the front and two on the back of each.

Art was whatever you could come up with: hand-drawn dungeon maps, sketches of characters or monsters, or whatever else you needed. Everything had to be line art, because anything else turned to mud when it was photocopied.

Then you needed access to a photocopier. That meant sneaking the use of one in an office or paying by the sheet at a local library or copy shop. Double-sided printing was beyond the capabilities of most copiers back then, so it had to be faked by running the pages through twice – and making sure that they were the right way round for the second pass. Failure resulting in overprinting, or in alternating pages being upside-down.

Next came assembly. The pages were folded in two and put in the right order, by hand, for stapling. Copy and print shops might have long-armed staplers that could reach the middle of an A4 sheet, but for mere mortals the process was a lot more fiddly.

Assuming that nothing had gone wrong, several hours of copying and assembly resulted in a few dozen copies in which all the pages were the right way up and in the correct sequence. Now, you had to sell them – hopefully enough of them to at least cover your costs.

One option was to take out a small ad in one of the ‘establishment’ magazines. People would send cheques or postal orders and you would put copies of your ‘zine in an envelope, hand-write their address on it, go to the Post Office for stamps, and snailmail them to each buyer. You quickly learned to offer subscriptions, because they were paid in full up front which took some of the financial pressure off the next few issues.

Another option, especially if you had any leftovers, was to do the rounds of local hobby games shops (if there were any near you), and persuade the owners to sell them for you. They might say yes, they might say no, or they might ask for a percentage of sales.

And that was it. Successful ‘zines sold in the dozens rather than the thousands, and surviving copies are rare and even collectible today. People did them for love as much as for money, as was the case with music ‘zines and those covering other topics, but they were a pillar of the gaming community back in the day. Now, blogs have made everything easy.