"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