It Certainly Does Fugit
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| Title: | It Certainly Does Fugit |
| Creator: | Harry Warner, Jr. |
| Date(s): | November 1941 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Science Fiction |
| Topic: | Fanzine production, time spent on fandom daily |
| External Links: | Hosted online by fanac.org; Fantascience Digest #14 pp. 20-22 (Nov. 1941) |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
It Certainly Does Fugit was a 1941 article by science fiction fan Harry Warner, Jr. He explained the total amount of time it took him to put out his zines Spaceways and Horizons, and estimated that he spent around three hours every day on various fan activities. Warner felt that the process of typing, printing and copying zines would remain unchanged, in contrast to prices.
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There recently appeared in SUN TRAILS an article analyzing the cost of being a fan. However, no one seems to have done any calculating yet on a similar subject: just how much time fandom consumes. Therefore, I’m going to try to remedy the deficiency. And in so doing, I shall be writing for the ages. Others can cipher out the money they spend, based on the temporal capitalistic system; I am writing on a subject guaranteed changeless!
First of all, fanzine publishing. Aside from miscellaneous magazines, which will be spoken of later, I issue eight copies of SPACEWAYS and four of HORIZONS each year. That means approximately two hundred pages of the former and fifty of the latter must be put out each year. And it requires almost precisely one hour for me to do one page of either. A page of SPACEWAYS takes about twenty minutes to dummy, twenty-five minutes to stancil, and the remaining fifteen minutes to mimeograph. (Of course, if I'd get out manuscripts, edit and dummy a page, then clean my type, take a stencil and stencil it, and finally get the mimeo in running order, ink it up, and run the page through, somewhat more than an hour would beconsumed, That hour-per-page works because I first dummy an entire issue, then stencil, then run off; by doing that, all the little details that take so long, if one page at a time is done, are eliminated.) I don't dummy HORIZONS; the material is written as it's typed on the mastersheet, and that consumes about a half-hour per page. The other half-hour is given over to hektoing, caring for the hekto, changing ribbons when hekto ribbon is being used, etc.
Of course, there is more work than that connected with issuing fanzines. Sorting and stapling an issue of SPACEWAYS requires about 3 hours. The same processes consume only an hour or a little more for HORIZONS, since the magazine is much smaller. Two or three hours more go into each issue of SPACEWAYS devoted to making up the subscription list and addressing and wrapping the magazines. Allow another hour for stamping and checking them, and the issue is ready to mail. HORIZONS, being distributed through the FAPA, doesn't require any time for bothering with subscription lists and wrapping individual copies. In other words—about 250 hours per year go into the actual publication of SPACEWAYS, and about 65 for HORIZONS. Not so terrible after all, it it? An average of an hour an evening, six evenings a week, put out the fanzines.
But there're lots of other things to do in fandom. Correspondence, for instance. I write one letter per day. If I skip a day, I write two the next; if two must be written in the same day, none is written the next. My letters average perhaps two pages in lenght, or about thirty minutes of typing them, and another ten minutes for addressing the envelope, finding a stamp, taking care of the carbon copy, and such little details. We have seen that less than an hour per day over the course of a year must be devoted to fanzines; therefore, fanzine publishing and letters together take an average of about an hour and a half per day.
Those were the two easiest things to figure. The remaining time consumers don't work on a schedule. The time it takes to read promags, for instance, is very difficult to average up. I read an average of something like seven a month, I've found. But just how much time is required to read one is the hard thing to determine. ASTOUNDING takes much longer to read than any other, partly because it has more pages, and partly because the stories can't be skimmed through in search of occasional gems, as is the case with other magazines/ I'm a fast reader when I'm reading anything except good stuff, and than means I sail through all promags except ASTOUNDING and UNKNOWN in a hurry. Less than an hour a day spent on reading the professional magazines would be a safe bet; a precisely accurate estimate isn't to be had. So now we've found that fan activities for those three items consume something over two hours each day, and less than two hours and a half.
The one way in which I differ from almost every other active fan is in traveling around to conventions, conferences, and the like. Virtually every fan in the country has been to at least two of the fan gatherings in the last two or three years, and many belong to local clubs and societies and take a large amount of time. I don't. The little time I spend with stf readers here in town is negligible, and I'm still not doing any exploring for fans in other towns. So no time is consumed that way. Where many fans who attend, for instance, just the big convention each year occupy themselves for a week or more with nothing but stf activities, I'm free. A fan like Ackerman or Widner probably would find his personal contacting with fans requiring more than an hour a day, on the average, over the course of a year.
Reading fanzines takes little time. Occasionally a big batch arrives in a few days, but there are often periods of up to a month when almost none comes in. Three or four arrivals a week seems to be the average, and one or two of those are two or four-page affairs which can be scanned in a hurry. If you want to be exact about it, better put down ten minutes a day for reading fanzines.
And that, friends, is about all. Not so much after all, is it? There are numerous other things, of course, that take up time, but for one reason or another they take very few hours over a course of a year. Filing away letters occupies a half-hour per month, filing away fanzines, perhaps the same amount of time. I used to spend some time writing—rather, trying to write—for the promags, but haven't written a word aimed at them for nearly a year now. Fan articles for publication in fanzines take a little time, but not so much. I read some stf books each year, but not enough to amount up to a very big figure. I write perhaps four postals a week, on the average; it takes only ten minutes to write a postal.
So, total time consumed on fan activities for me: less than three hours a day. I don’t regret it. I’m positive that I get more pleasure out of spending that time on stf than I would on collecting antiques, planting a garden, or keeping a termitary. How about you?