"Idea! Loc it now and receive the next issue"

Idea is a way-too-occasional genzine blessed with marvelous (and patient) fanwriters and artists, readers who send terrific letters of comment, and an editor who does her best to make sure her contributors look good in print. I delight in merging traditional and modern fanzine sensibilities and technologies, using all to their greatest benefit to whatever degree I can.

All of my fan publishing efforts reflect this, from the Minneapa 'zine I wrote on CPT word processing equipment and cut to stencil on a Diablo 630 printer, to Idea, which is laid out using Quark, PageMaker, Photoshop, Illustrator, and similar graphics-oriented programs, and then electrostencilled for reproduction on both modern and ancient mimeo equipment.

Thanks to efanzines.com, Idea is now available in a form for people who hate the look and feel of Twiltone...or, Fibertone, to be both specific and accurate.

For those whose primary exposure to fanzines is in the electrons, Twiltone and Fibertone are fuzzy papers used by some mimeographers, including me. The paper absorbs ink easily. This is good because it avoids offsetting -- still-wet ink from one page transferring to the back of the next copy as it falls into the output tray. "Slipsheeting" is the technique traditionally used to avoid offsetting on standard, smooth-surfaced forms of mimeo paper. I use slipsheeting myself on covers and other art-intensive pages, and, thanks to Linda Bushyager, I even have an automatic slipsheeter that attaches to the mimeograph.

However, Twiltone and its fuzzy cousins are very much "love 'em or hate 'em" papers. Lots of fans actively dislike the touch of Twiltone, even some of the fans who reliably show up to help collate Idea whenever it is that I get around to publishing an issue. I'm glad to have an on-line version available for them, and for interested fans who aren't y/e/t/ on my mailing list.

Notes and caveats for readers and collectors

The PDFs available here were made from the final versions of the computer files used to print laser masters of Idea. Electrostencils were then made from those masters, and pages were then mimeographed from those e-stencils. It is common for changes to creep into the printing process. An illo that was originally going to be blue gets printed in red, or pages need to be re-run when I accidentally print page 32 separately rather than on the back of page 31, leaving no time to re-do the spot color. Other times, plain, old-fashioned artistic sensibilities or mimeo realities dictate some other change.

Then there are the electronic quirks. I still don't know why Acrobat can't correctly render the Fontek font "Hand Drawn", but the art on page 29 of Idea 11 now uses Dom Casual instead.

In some ways, these PDFs are higher quality than an original copy of Idea. In others, they're lower quality. Most of all, they're just visually different. If I were laser-printing Idea, I wouldn't use Horley Old Style for the body copy, let alone at this size and leading -- it took three rounds of mimeo tests to come up with that combination as the one I wanted for the printed page. If I were doing a fanzine for the web, it wouldn't look like Idea, which is edited and designed for the mimeographed page. But I am delighted to at long last make Idea available via the web, and plan to make PDFs of as many previous issues as possible. I hope you enjoy the 'zine, and even more so that you respond with a letter of comment, contribution query, or other form of participation.

Geri Sullivan gfs@toad-hall.com