Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2019: Week 5

A group of late 1970s friend book pages, obtained from an estate sale in Anaheim, California in 2016.

"Friend Books" were used by pre-teens and teens in the 1970s and 1980s as a way of finding other like-minded fans in the pre-Internet era.

Unlike the dreaded "slam books" which began circulating in the US in the 1940s, these books were not used to bully, but as a means of connecting with other fans.

Some "friend books" were sized small enough to fit into an international envelope (2-3 inches), and consisted of no more than a few pages. The covers could be pages cut from magazines or advertisements and were stapled or taped into a booklet shape. Many were multi-fandom, but some focused on single fandoms like Star Wars.