This was my first issue, produced mostly during
my senior year of high school and into the summer just before going off
to college. It was 28 pages, mimeographed, with offset covers (the
inside back cover was blank). Joe Miller’s back cover illustration
(an etching on Bristol board) was his only contribution to the issue.
He viewed his fandom days as history and he really did not want anything
to do with a new Barsoomian. The dedication on page 2 is to a woman
who gave me a hand-cranked mimeograph machine she no longer needed.
My editorial provides some additional background on the
publishing history, the transition to Taurasi, and Joe’s submissions to
Pete Ogden’s Erbania. Most of this issue was reprinted articles from
other fanzines and their sources are noted here, so I won’t repeat all
of it. As I noted with issue #6, John Harwood’s “Morf and the Valley
of the Old Ones” was originally written for Joe Miller. But Joe quit
before it could appear and James Taurasi wanted nothing to do with fan
fiction. As Harwood explains in his “Afterwod”, it later appeared
in Norb Reinsel’s “Norb’s Notes” #10 for January 1962. I honestly
don’t recall much about Roger David Chambers, who contributed a very brief
book review and a promo for his “Contan” creation. Whether or not
Contan ever made an appearance elsewhere I don’t know, but I was also done
with fan fiction.
As noted in the reprint data, I included additional artwork
by Ken Webber and David Kohr Jr. that had been available to me when the
original issue was published. It didn’t get used because I couldn’t
afford additional offset work, particularly for the Contan illustration.
Conversely, I omitted two pages of material from the original edition
in the reprint. One was a listing of fanzines while the other was
my personal sales list. The reprint was 16 pages and I couldn’t see
going to 20 pages to include them. So, for completeness, I have included
them in these scans (just before the back cover illustration). It’s
a pretty good listing of the fanzines popular then and, as always, it’s
fun to see the ridiculously low prices on used books.
One other note. I sent courtesy copies of The Barsoomian
#8 to Hulbert Burroughs. He wrote a nice letter back and thanked
me. He also said he wanted to buy four books and one magazine from
my sales list. As it turned out, we did a trade for some dust jackets.
This was pretty heady stuff for a kid just out of high school -- I never
dreamed I’d be selling ERB books to ERB’s son!
~ Paul Allen
