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Collating Party

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Synonyms: Collator, collate
See also: Zines
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A collating party was an event where friends were invited over to physically help put together the finished pages of a fanzine, an APA mailing, or convention publication. It was a volunteer effort and a major social event; so much so, that cartoons, meta-fic[1] and filk were created to celebrate (or explain) the phenomenon.

from Crossed Sabers #3, artist is Tian
"How To Write A Filksong" by Helene Lynn Kent, which describes a collating party; from Stylus #1, about collating Nome #2

How To Collate -- Some Tips

The booklet issued by boojums Press and the STW had these helpful notes in 1975:

This is where a club comes in handy. Consider borrowing your little sister's girl scout troop. Place the neat little piles of printed pages in sequence around a table -- odd numbered sides up. Get as many people as possible (12 people can collate 300 copies of a 12-sheet zine in about 1 1/2 to 2 hours) and go to it. Start at the beginning and each time you pick up a sheet, turn it over to make sure the even-numbered side has printed clearly. Consider giving all your helpers either a free copy, a half-price copy, or a hearty handclasp on the back. [2]

Some editors offered other types of rewards:

Thendara Council will hold a special meeting/reunion for collating STARSTONE #2 late in June or early in July, open by invitation only but anyone who subscribes or comes with a subscriber will be invited if you send a SASE before June 1st. (If you come to this one, be prepared to work, but you will get your Starstone for exactly what the out-of-pocket printing costs are; attendees at the #1 party got it for $1.01. MZB will attend and perhaps read from an unfinished Darkover novel.) [3]

Other "rewards" were a bit more interesting:

My cooking is notoriously awful. However, since fannish socializing does seem to frequently revolve around food, over the years I have come up with a few passable stand-by recipes. Well, I can't really call them recipes, since I tend to cook according to mood and what's available, but the following are meals that have drawn compliments over the years.

This came about because I was having a collating party and thought it only fair that I should feed people after they were nice enough to put the covers for my favourite fanzine on backward. I prepared the chilli the day before the party and that's when Rich, who was then my flatmate, came along for a taste. "Too bland," he said, "should be much hotter". I'd already depleted my supply of chilli powder so, in desperation, emptied the entire contents of a 2 oz jar of tabasco sauce into the chilli. The result brought tears to Rich's eyes. He also ate three bowls and didn't speak to me again for two weeks. The recipe has been refined over the 10 years or so since that first attempt, and has been served at many fannish gatherings, with much success.

This will feed about 10 very hungry fans, or 20 polite ones. [4]

How many fans does it take to collate a zine?

...due to the bad road conditions, the crowd was smaller than anticipated but the people there were all good folk.

[...]

Five people are about right for a 100 print run (our budget's tighter than a rusty hub nut) of an 82 page zine, so we worked for 2 hours and talked for 3.

Those hundred copies are all, gone now. We'll have to print again in June. At least we won't have to deal with .. .or maybe I'd better not commit the weather to anything on paper. [5]

Equipment was important!

Garlic Press is pleased to announce that it has acquired part ownership of a heavy-duty stapler. All those who participated in our last two collating parties may also be pleased to hear it! [6]

Fan clubs often held collating parties as part of their meetings:

[ Keeper's Tower is] "Local" in the strange sense of including those who seem to pass through my house regularly, ranging from Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Members to date, Anne Golar, Joan Winston, Beverly Graifman, Elisabeth Waters, Frances Zawacky, Linda Deneroff, Cynthia Levine. That list of names may sound familiar to some of you. They are primarily involved in my Kraith series and in Ambrov Zeor. In fact, on December 19th, we had our first joint meeting with the New Jersey based Valeron Council, at the Ambrov Zeor collating party.[7]

Collation was also sometimes a convention activity, as every editor wanted to have an issue available for sale at the con:

These were also the days when nothing was ever ready on time; as a result, I spent the Friday night/Saturday morning In the committee room helping to stuff the registration packs and produce a zine. Dot Owens, the chairperson, had brought the duplicator with her, and press-ganged just about everybody in sight to collate. We sent her to bed about 2 am, then her husband Joe rang to say he'd Just found SHORE LEAVE behind the sofa, and didn't we need it? Jerome Perkins was posted off to Halifax to collect it first thing Saturday morning. [8]

Convention collating is a time-honoured tradition, it seems:

Then she put us in touch with Ruth Berman and Eleanor Arnason, both of whom had material to contribute, and Juanita helped us with the layout and the artwork, and Sherna got the Publications Department at the University she was going to, to print the magazine for us. Then we collated it at the NyCon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention in 1967, which was held in Manhattan, and we got friends to help us collate, put it together, and staple it. It was a very long magazine for that time. It had 45 doubled-sided pages, and we did not own a heavy-duty stapler. We didn’t know there was such a thing. So, we were at the convention, in my bedroom we were doing this. We had a wall stapler, and we stapled it through the magazine, pried it off with a screwdriver, and somebody closed each prong of the wall staple with pliers, which is why if you have an original, first-printing copy, the staple will have started to cut through the paper because it has sharp edges, unlike a regular staple designed to staple paper together. [9]

Convention zines also got in on the act:

By 9:00 Sunday night we realized that we had missed our hoped-for deadline. Many of the people from the con had already left and we had only begun to run off the stencils. People were now drifting in and out like leaves in the autumn breezes. A few of them stayed around long enough to see what was going on or ask "Is the zine done," or "Can we collate now?" Never have I seen so many people willing to collate in all my life as I have seen at that con. I am of a mind to bring along all of my fanzines to conventions in the future if I can but incite that spirit once again. Part of the reason that we had so many eager would-be collators hanging around was because there wasn't anything else going on. The art auction Sunday had lasted an interminable length of time and the Kraith affirmation held later on was a definite turn-off for some people. Others had left just to find something more interesting and wound up at the con suite.

[...]

I think that it was about 1:00 in the morning before we ever began to collate. We had sent messengers to some of the rooms that still maintained life, and within minutes the room was filled to overflowing with collators. Within the hour the first copy of the zine finally appeared...a little later than we had originally expected, but we had done it! [10]

Everyone and their dog cat were included:

Announcing the FIRST Annual SHADO Handbook Printing and Collating Extravaganza!

Yes. folks. tha big handbook is really going to happen, and I, for one, can use some help getting it all put together, so all you Southern Caiifonia [sic] operatives who have secretly habored an insane urge to got involved in the mysterious intrigue of SHADO internal operations here's your golden opportunity. The festivilies [sic] are scheduled to get underway at [street address redacted] Hollywood, Calif. beginning at 10 A.M. (or thereabouts), Saturday, October 21, and continuing to who knows when . If further work remains to be done. operations will reconvene same time, same station the following day Non alcoholic refreshments will be provided, bring yowr [sic] own poison if you like. There's a 24-hour grocery just down the block for midnight (on midday) raids, should the need arise.

Round the clock entertainment featuring UFO, Prisoner, Man From Atlantis, and Fantastic Journey videotapes will be provided. The apartment is inhabited by four cats, so those of you with fur allergies be forewarned. Come prepared to be ink-stained. The mimeo is a filthy machine if we end up having to use it (I'm still trying to pull off the finances to get it offset, but it's still touch and go)

If you"re planning on coming, please give me a little warning, preferably through the mail since I'm hard to catch at home, but For those of you who have no phone phobias, my number is [redacted], with the best times to catch me between 11 PM and 1 AM or between 6 and 10 AM. It should be an interesting experience and I'm looking forward to having a little help and meeting some of you. As further inducement (as if the above benefits aren't enough), everyone who shows up and pitches in will receive a formal acknowledgment in the next Status Report. [11]

Including family members sometimes could be risky:

All my family, and all my long-time friends know I am into science fiction in a big way, but for many years only my younger sister knew there was such a thing as slash and that I was into it. More recently my mother got to help out with collating one of our fanzines and it happened to be an adult and slash B7 zine so I broke that to her gently (not hesitantly, I'm too old to apologise for my choices any more) just in case she started reading a page in an interesting spot. I wasn't worried about getting a lecture, and because I treated it in an casual way so did she. Since then she has taken a very slightly higher interest in the adult zines — only because we occasionally have to leave half-collated piles of them around the lounge/dining room — she definitely needed to know so she could head off any of her visitors who may have gotten curious and gone to pick one up. [12]

Some editors put on a weekend-long party:

Would-Be-Collators — contact me with your address and phone number if you'd like to know when collations will be. Collations are generally weekend-long parties; you get fed, and we sometimes hit good movies in town and/or go horseback riding. You also get to meet the cats and Wolf. [13]

Fans enjoyed the chance to get together and talk to fellow fen:

I would like to send many thanks to Connie F. and Jan L. for asking Pam and I to our very first Collating Party for the ‘UnZine.”… If this is what putting a zine together is like, I know why everyone says it is so hard to do. I mean, staying up late talking about the stories, getting up early to discuss what’s to be done next, then staying up late again going over artwork and deciding which one looks best where and finally rising early the morning of the deadline, and going over everything one last time. This is definitely hard work. Again, thanks for the experience of putting the “UnZine” together. [14]

Collating parties as the meaning of fannishness:

There's nothing like doing a zine for me that brings back my whole sense of what being a fan is all about. Between reading the stories, referencing other zines to see what's current in layout and mastheads, discussing the various stories and plans with the authors and co-editor, hassling with the printers, sitting around with a group of fans collating and binding, cleaning up little tiny pieces of paper off the floor, I really get that feeling of being part of something I love in a concrete and specific way. [15]

Lack of volunteers could mean delays:

If you have been waiting for COH for a long, long time and have not yet received your copy, I know the reason. Poor Syn is collating these and putting them together and sending them out all by herself -- taking about an hour per zine, so that means she can only mail out ten or twenty every week. It certainly is a pity that she's not getting volunteer help with the collating. She says she didn't have it done commercially because that would have added five dollars to the cost of each copy.

Here in the midwest we have collating parties, which are a low-cost way of doing the work and having fun at the same time. If you have a zine to put together—and enough space to do it in—you invite a bunch of friends to help you, and all you have to do is feed them and provide floor space for them to sleep on — and a free copy of the zine, of course. Collating a zine that's thick and that has been done in a large printing hard work, I'll grant, and conducive to backaches. But the whole experience is fun, too.

But the whole experience is fun, too. I've done collating for Galactic Discourse, Don't Tell It to the Captain (twice), and for some of Lois Welling's reprints. Collating Captain the first time was a real experience, because of where we did it -- at a big Standard Oil research facility in Illinois, in one of the corporate conference rooms. We had to be checked in and out by security at the gates, and they searched our cars when we left.

[16]

And the bigger the zine, the harder the job:

Collating time. You invite your friends over, promise them a meal, and half of them faint when they see the massive stacks of pages awaiting them. Over a period of two-three days, you finally get the copies together. Sure, it was only supposed to take a day, but half the people fainted, remember? Not to mention the ones who fell asleep from lack of rest and the one who had to put methiolate on their hands from the paper cuts (ED NOTE; Or the ones who were busy until Christmas or suddenly heard their mother's calling when you said the words "collating party" to begin with or)... [17]

Tradition!

From Nancy Kippax:

"Did I mention the collating parties? These evolved, too, over time. We sent out a call to everyone within driving distance to come on a specified date and help collate. The grand incentive was that collators got a free copy of the zine. This, of course, didn't really matter to those who were already contributors, but they came anyway. Bev and I would provide food and drink – buckets of fried chicken, or a crock pot of barbecue beef, chips and other snacks, cole slaw, whatever we decided was appropriate for the weather and the season. We would lay out the pages all along Bev's extended dining room table, fanning them as we'd been taught in the beginning, and we'd usually get about 15 pages (that would be 30 pages of the book) on one trip. We'd take up our places and walk around the table, picking up a sheet at a time. When the first section was finished, we'd lay out the next, and so on, until we reached the end of the zine. Workers weary of trudging around the table, sat down and put the separate sections together. Let me tell you, my friends, that was a lot of trips around that table! For a long while, Bev had green shag carpet in her dining room (well, it was the '70s, after all!) and I tell you honestly that we eventually wore a path in that carpet! Another staple of the collating party was the music. In the beginning, we had a vinyl 45 record that I had bought by mail without hearing, and I regret I'm unable to say now who it was by. It was called "The Ballad of Star Trek" and it began, "The Great Bird of the Galaxy/Swooped down on prime TV. . ." and the resounding chorus went something like, "Star Trek Lives/The Trekkies grow stronger each day/Enterprise flies on/Meeting aliens and planets on its way". It was a delightful little ditty. We'd also play the albums recorded by Leonard Nimoy. (Bilbo/Bilbo Baggins/Only three feet tall/Bilbo/Bilbo Baggins/Greatest little Hobbit of them all. . . Rollin', rollin'/Rollin' down the river. . .) Later, of course, we had our own Omicron Ceti III songs to sing aloud, with or without music. All that enthusiastic singing made the work more bearable! [18]

Alison Wallace of Austrek remembered in The Captain's Log 200th special issue:

Log collations were an event by themselves. Once a month at least 8 - 10 people would descend on my house and copious amounts of Mony's pizza and coke were consumed whilst watching "Hey Hey It's Saturday" before the collating commenced. Gail and I were co-editors as I had two children to cope with and couldn't dedicate as much time as I liked to the Log. Baby cartoons injected my personality into my editing (humour imitating reality) and then I fell pregnant again. Sticky fingers, nappies, toilet training and delivering the Log to the G.P.O. were not a lot of fun (one on a hip, another on a lead and the Logs were in the stroller).

[19]

In comments to a meta essay by bluecove, [munchkinofdoom] remembered zine fandom fondly:

My greatest love in fandom, alongside conventions? Zines. From my tatty, dog-eared copy of Spock Enslaved to a recent SGA slash zine Military/Intelligence. New fen may never get it, but there is nothing to beat that feeling of a postpak arriving in the mail, and having the finished product in hand, or, as you've said, the satisfaction of seeing your own zine take form before your eyes. And, yes, nothing can beat a collating party. I've been involved with two presses in my time, one gen and one slash, and I will treasure those memories always. [20]

Jeanne Gold also had fond memories of collating parties:

Zines were produced by hand. Some editors used mimeograph machines to print their zines, while others used photocopiers. There were zine binding parties, where fans would get together and punch and bind hundreds of zines while watching episodes of their favorite shows their only payment: food. It was truly a labor of love. [21]

Another Description

From Fandom is for the Young:

Collating the fanzine requires the cooperation of the neighborhood! Since our dear lady has become the comic relief of the neighborhood, no one wants to miss out on all the fun.

Lord, lead us not into temptation and deliver us from collation! Never in this world has ever there been a disorganized mess like that of collating a fanzine. Running a mimeo is the relish tray in the meal of amateur publication. Collation is the entree. A large working space is required, preferably the round table from King Arthur's Court. Karen has found that the round table is not nearly large enough. It takes the entire eleven hundred square feet of her basement! Theory requires that you first find page one and continue in sequence until you have collated the entire fanzine. Often, page one is at the bottom of a stack of pages four feet high- ingenuity liberates page one without disturbing the rest of the pile, though probability reigns high that, since your children have helped, page two is somewhere in the center of the pile. Having liberated all of the pages and spread them in orderly fashion, you step back, only to realize that the pattern formed on the floor resembles the mainspring of a watch. Bending and stretching, being careful not to step on any of the precious piles, the master fanzine is collated and proofread. Oh my! Well, what do you know! Page three has been mysteriously printed on the back of page ten! Page eleven is found in front of page thirty-seven, and page thirty-seven is in place of page three.

From Fandom is for the Young, a Collating Party! This art is by Karen Flanery

All right! Reprint is impossible since the mimeo has managed to neatly destroy most of the stencils. To avoid typing six new stencils and having to argue with the mimeo through them all, we make one explaining that the readers will have to read out of sequence to finish the story. We arrange our explanation to be collated with the rest and send oul our invitations. Now is the time for all good neighbors to come to the aid of the collating party. We supply the pretzels and the beer. They supply the labor. Collating a fanzine is better than a game of Twister, and Jack LaLanne would leap with joy at the exercise we get in the process. What starts out as great fun, has muscles as we try to avoid stepping on stacks of pages, lifting, stretching and bending, screaming in agony. Any neophyte attending his first collating party finds that he wakes the next day feeling as though he has overnight contracted an acute case of all-over arthritis! Pretzels, anyone? While collating, we find that the mimeo has foiled us despite all our efforts, and we have pages that are blank, pages that are printed but unreadable, and pages that are only half printed. It calls for a watchful eye. All those pages not usable are committed to a trash can situated five feet above the floor. When the collation is done and the barrel is full, we con the two strongest men into carrying it out. Finally, all good things must come to an end, and the fanzine is collated.

Now, we must declare another party! We still have to staple. Twice! Why for you staple twice, you say? Because the staples are never long enough. The innocent little things have no delusions of grandeur Never in their existence have thev dared think thev could hold together some ninety-odd pages of twenty-pound bond. Once stapled, we must find envelopes. And stuff them, and lick them shut, and address them. We now find we have seven stacks of stuffed, licked, and addressed envelopes five feet high!

Wash Your Hands

The editors of the Southern Enclave offered the following advice to wannabe zine publishers in 1991:

If you have the money to spare, your printer will collate and bind your zines for you. If you're on a limited budget, then you're stuck with the grunt work. The most fun solution is to throw a collating party — invite in all your friends, provide the munchies (but make everyone wash their hands before the collating starts), throw on some music and get to work! Collaters get a freebie copy of the zine for helping out. [22]

New Technologies

Not everyone is nostalgic for the good old days... From one editor, Deb Walsh, talking about the publishing of her zine B7 Complex:

For the first time, I looked into paying to have my zines collated, since I could no longer host a collating party in my sister’s apartment. I missed the social aspect of the collating party – they could be so wonderfully chaotic and fun – but I actually ended up with more saleable copies of the zines. Ultimately, it proved to be less expensive to pay for the collating than to have a party to do the collating as a group. Yet another step in gradual passing of fannish traditions as new technologies came available. [23]

From Elaine Hauptman, in the editorial of Don't Give Up On Us, Baby:

Eighteen years, That's how long it's been since Lucy and I first published Who You Know, What You Know and How You Know It in 1983. It's difficult to say if that one was just too good to top, if I'm the worst procrastinator on the planet. Actually, considering the fact that both the old and new zines contain 'adult' material and require age statements to purchase them, you could say that my previous zine is old enough to own this new one... Times have certainly changed in the past 18 years! Way back, when we published 'Who You Know..." I did it all by hand. That means I typed the whole zine on Black Beauty, my old Selectric typewriter, on oversized pages (so I could take the pages to Kinko's and pay .15 per page to reduce them to 85%) and I did all the titles and little graphics in presstype. And when I laid out the pages, if something didn't fit fight, I cut and pasted! And then I had the whole thing offset printed, and held a huge collating party where many of my friends helped me collate and bind the thing. Thankfully, those days are in the past. Lucy produced the zine hold in your hand on a computer. [24]

From Joyce Thompson, Datazine:

Wow, Datazine is 50 issues old. It's been a long haul, and a lot of fun, hard, satisfying work... We are probably dumb enough to continue for another 50 issues. Thanks to the growth in fandom, Datazine has gone from a 24-page ring-around-the-collating-table-affair to a computer-produced, machine-collated piece of cake. I really doubt that KathE and I would have continued if the job hadn't gotten any easier. I remember well the first issue I helped KathE produce. On her spastic typewriter, we typed out the listings... then after the printer was finished, we had to lay it out on her dining room table and wear a path in KathE's already thread-bare carpet. HOURS and HOURS later, we stapled, hand-stamped, and labeled each and every copy. [25]

Before the internet, fans would type stories and then either keep them privately for themselves or hand them around to personal friends, or send them in to zines. Published zines operated by an editor (or an editing team – which I suspect just meant three or more nerdy chicks who had experience with their school paper in high school or college) who was a fan with access to a mimeograph or whatever the hell other mass-printing technology existed in the 1970s and had the time, connections, and know-how to solicit stories and artwork from a number of authors (usually via personal connections or advertisements in other amateur zines), edit, copy-edit, format, compile, print, bind, advertise, and distribute to a mailing list of fans willing to purchase the stories. Sometimes they did it by committee, in a big party. Really, I never appreciate the internet enough until I’m reminded of how hard it is to do things without it. No seriously, if you're at all intrigued by old fandom history or fan culture, read those pages I linked to. They are the most amazing fandom-related things I've ever seen and it makes me grin happily until my face hurts just thinking about it. Fans are so awesome. [26]

Gallery

References

  1. ^ "Ordeal" by Winston Howlett (meta fiction, humor, about going to a collating party for Probe); Tetrumbriant Issue #13 (1977)
  2. ^ from Communication the Hard Way
  3. ^ Jacqueline Lichtenberg's comments in "Darkover Newsletter]] #11
  4. ^ "The Chili That Stopped Rich Cold" by Allyn Cadogan in Fanfoodery or the plain fans guide to eating (1987)
  5. ^ from Sufan #8
  6. ^ "News from Garlic Press" by Devra Langsam, Plak-Tow Issue #3 (1968)
  7. ^ Jacqueline Lichtenberg, from Darkover Newsletter #3
  8. ^ Terracon convention report by Judy Mortimore, in IDIC #4
  9. ^ from Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Devra Langsam
  10. ^ "The Story of The Cage, the Se-Kwester*Con Too Conzine... or... How Not to Publish a Fanzine" by M.J. Fisher. in Spectrum Issue #33 (1977)
  11. ^ SHADO - SEPTEMBER 1978, Archived version
  12. ^ [Agent 6.4] responding to the TOTNI posed in Short Circuit Issue #13 (1993)
  13. ^ "Editorial" by Lori Chapek-Carleton or Gordon Carleton, Warped Space Issue #43 (1980)
  14. ^ S and H Issue #31 (1982)
  15. ^ "Running All The Way" in Strange Bedfellows Issue #11 (1995)
  16. ^ from Flora Poste in K/S & K.S. (Kindred Spirits) #17 (1985)
  17. ^ "The Bigger They Come: The Trials and Tribulations of Megazines" by Jeanine Hennig in Blue Pencil Issue #4 (1986)
  18. ^ from Nancy's Live Journal
  19. ^ "Kids, Committees and Chaos -- Let's Do It Again!" by Alison Wallace, The Captain's Log issue #200 (1994)
  20. ^ comments to Seven Reasons Why Selling Fanzines Isn't Bad, Wrong, or Hazardous to Your Fannish Health by bluecove (2006)
  21. ^ "Jeanne Gold on The Rise and Fall of the Fanzine" by Jeanne Gold (2014)
  22. ^ from Southern Enclave #28
  23. ^ from None, Archived version
  24. ^ "Editorial" by Elaine Hauptman in Don't Give Up On Us, Baby (2001)
  25. ^ from the editorial by Joyce Thompson, Datazine Issue #50 (1987)
  26. ^ "Reading a 1977 Zine in 2014: Zebra Three" by Intrigueing (2014)