Confessions of a Recovered Zine-aholic
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| Title: | Confessions of a Recovered Zine-aholic |
| Creator: | Linda Wong |
| Date(s): | September 25, 2011 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Beauty and the Beast (TV) |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Confessions of a Recovered Zine-aholic, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Confessions of a Recovered Zine-aholic is a 2011 Beauty and the Beast (TV) essay by Linda Wong.
Excerpts
Like many fans of the Beauty and Beast TV series, once the show went off the air, I thought the dream ended. I wasn’t aware of fan clubs or conventions, and I had no idea that stories were being written about Vincent and Catherine and the rest of the tunnel people. And I had absolutely no clue that fanzines, or zines, were being published.
When I got an internet connection in 1999, I don’t know what made me do a search for Beauty and the Beast, but I found the Songs of the Bluebird website. And I found FANFIC! I was in heaven reading the stories posted on this and the other BATB websites that I found. I ready EVERYTHING, even 3S fanfic though I preferred classic fanfic and especially the adult stories. After reading everything I could find, I was hungry for more.
My first zine purchases were directly from fanfic writers who were still selling copies of their zines. Then I discovered eBay! BATB fanzines were the reason that I signed up for eBay. Nearly half of my zines were purchased through eBay. Sometimes the spirit of competition got the better of me when bidding for a particular zine and I’m embarrassed to admit how much I ended up paying for some of my zines. (Especially when I saw the same zines for much less at the conventions!)I went to my first BATB convention in 2003 in San Francisco. And there were ZINES. Boxes and boxes of zines! There was a whole room full of zines and other BATB items and I kept going back and looking through the boxes for zines that I didn’t already have. I ended up with 27 new zines from my first convention. JoAnn Baca still laughs at the memory of me dragging my VERY heavy suitcase through the lobby. I actually had to do a bit of repacking at the airline counter since my bag was over the weight limit and I had to put some of the zines in my carry-on.
The rest of my zines were purchased from fans selling off their collections, websites selling used zines, or publishers stilling selling copies of their zines. I currently have a library of 564 zines.