THE VOLUME 1 NUMBER 1 SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY MAGAZINE CHECKLIST

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THE COLLECTION

Credit where credit is due: There are four resources that have proven invaluable to this project, three that graciously provided permission to borrow their images and a fourth that provided historical data. I strongly urge you to visit these sites:

Phil Stephenson-Payne's Galactic Central Press pulp magazine index. Phil has provided both image and data support and is a fun guy to talk to. He also maintains a complete publication history checklist for numerous important titles.

Jacques Hamon's Noosfere visual guide to American science fiction pulps (most of it is in French, but if you're familiar with the magazines this won't present any barrier to enjoyment). This site has complete image runs of selected magazine titles.

Terry Gibbons's VISCO was an early inspiration for these pages as the first 'visual' checklist of SF magazine titles.

Locus Magazine hosts the Stephen T. Miller & William G. Contento Index of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction magazines from 1890 on. Virtually everyone collecting and researching these magazines uses this list as a baseline.

I've been collecting science fiction literature since about 1967-1968 (if I've done my sums correctly that's the school year I attended 4th grade and made my first visit to the bookmobile. If you want to read more about that experience, please visit the articles section of this website.) That's just about four decades of collecting and during that time I've managed to acquire several thousand books and several hundreds of magazines.

Such is the avidness (?) of my yen for collecting that, had I been able to devote all of my income over the years to the pursuit, I'd have had to ask 4E Ackerman if he wanted to establish the Ackermansion-East. I'll readily admit that my personal holdings are not anywhere near the top ranks of SF collections - but it hasn't been for lack of desire.

Early on I particularly fell in love with both anthologies and the magazines. My infatuation with anthologies I can trace to the acquisition of one of the paperback reprints of the Astounding Science Fiction Reader. The stories were top-flight (I made my first acquantance with EF Russell in that collection) and became fascinated with the idea that by picking up an anthology I was acquiring a host of new authors - all for the same price as a single author's work. To me this seemed something of steal and I ran around grabbing as many as I could. My timing was fortunate as well since numerous publishers were offering a host of anthologies: Carr & Wollheim had started their 'Year's Best' in 1966; Merrill's series was out, Galaxy Reader, F&SF reader, Orbit by Knight, not to mention the regular offerings from Conklin, Boucher, Amis and others.

I eventually became aware of the fact that there had to be a "first" SF anthology and began delving into the history of this publishing concept. Ultimately I managed to pick up BOTH a copy of Wollheim's 'Portable Novels of Science Fiction' and Healy & McComas' 'Adventures in Time & Space' (not to mention Conklin's 'Big Book of Science Fiction' as well as a few other early offerings).

The collecting of magazines represents a watershed moment of maturation on my part. I first encountered them in a book stall at a local farmer's market: 25 cents a copy (many of which had the top half of the cover removed...). This happened within a year of my discovery of SF and I probably had the same reaction to magazines that I did to anthologies: multiple stories, multiple authors, all for the same price as a paperback.

I quickly became aware of the fact that there were hundreds of titles (the first magazine I picket up happened to be an Amazing Stories, which was not shy about mentioning its history) and that it was going to be hard, expensive work to obtain every single one of them.

After becoming acquainted with Amazing's history, I quickly figured out that I could save both time and money if I concentrated on getting just the first copy of each new magazine; again, fortune smiled on me as I was a stone's throw away from New York city and hundreds of used bookstores - not to mention the other collector's who sold off excess inventory to support their own habits.

Over the years I've managed to amass a pretty substantial collection of anthology and magazine "firsts"; I continue to fill in the collection to this day.

The remaining pages of this section of the website are devoted to the Volume 1, Number 1 magazines in my collection - beginning with cover scans in the order of their publication.

The initial page is very image intensive (260+ scans of Vol 1 No 1 magazine covers) and may take a bit to load. There are numerous links within the main page, although not all of them are completed yet. When finished, viewers will be able to click on an image or a variety of index links in order to find or look at various magazine covers.

Additional information on the nature of the interactivity of this page, the nature of the collection and notes on organization can be seen by clicking on the 'notes' link.

The pages were originally put together for personal use so that I could more easily identify issues from my want list.

NAVIGATION