Vendredi Press

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Zine Publisher
Name: Vendredi Press
Contact: Deb Walsh
Type: gen
Fandoms: Star Wars, Blake's 7, multimedia, Real Ghostbusters, SG-1, Space: 1999, Kung Fu: TLC, SeaQuest, Robin of Sherwood, Shadow Chasers
Status:
Other:
URL: My Life in Fandom, Archived version and My Life in Fandom - Deb Walsh's Zines Home, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.
a 1992 flyer printed in My Name Ain't Mary Sue! #1
1993 flyer submission guidelines printed in My Name Ain't Mary Sue! #1

Vendredi Press is the name of a series of fanzine presses run by Deb Walsh.

Press Names

Other press names (in chronological order) were:

Description

In her online bio (likely 2010) on her webpage (now offline):

Vendredi Press is the latest press name used by your humble editor/publisher, Deb Walsh, for current fanzines. Since I've made the mistake of thinking I could get away from fandom a few times, when I've admitted my mistake and returned, I've normally taken on a new press name to help me distinguish from mail based on old out-of-print info, and current projects. But since I still have a few zines left in print from my Vendredi Press days (which started in 1991), I figured I'd keep the press name this time around. Especially since at least two of the zines that were born in the early days of Vendredi Press will see new issues released in the next year or two. [1]

Why the Press Ceased

From a 1993 flyer:

Why the name change? I left fandom for a while, and now I'm back again - with a new name to go with my new enthusiasm.

In 2007, Vendredi Press ceased publishing because, according to Deb Walsh, it was becoming harder:

...to recruit enough writers and to sell enough zines to make all the hard work of putting a zine together worthwhile. [2]

The editorial in the last issue of B7 Complex (July 1988) is a bitter one, referring to drudgery, bootleggers, whiners, and assholes:

There will be no further issues of B7 Complex; please do not send Blake's 7 manuscripts to the editor for consideration. The editor is currently (July 1988) negotiating with a possible distributor of back issues of B7 Complex; a decision should be made by September 1988. This distributor will not, under any circumstances, be Bonnie Vitti.

This zine is dedicated with thanks and affection to my friends, contributors and supportive readers, without who it would have been unbearable drudgery. The issues of B7 Complex that will never be published are dedicated to the bootleggers (those who sell for profit, and those who copy because they're too cheap to pay the price of the zine legitimately), the whiners ("I sent you money for my zines two weeks ago and I haven't got them yet! I'm going to report you!"), and the assholes ("I sent you a story five weeks ago, and I don't care if you advertise 6 to 8 weeks, where's my reply?" -- this following closing ceremonies of a con on which I was a co-chairperson...) and "What do you mean, you want to change a comma in my perfect story" -- "perfect" stories are usually total crap in Blake's 7 fandom, for making B7 fandom an unpleasant place to be after 7 long years of hard work and a lot of hard-earned pleasure. It's been real.

From the publisher's website, circa 2010:

By this time, I'd been embroiled in a fight with a pair of fans from the West Coast who were bootlegging zines and selling them in quantities as "used" at conventions up and down the West Coast. I remember one fellow zined telling me that the easiest way to demonstrate that this was a lie was the condition of the binding on the zines - if the zine was stapled and the staples showed no sign of corrosion (from salt in the air), there was no way the zine was used. These people were ripping editors off at an alarming rate, but what was even more alarming was that fans didn't care. They just wanted the zine now. Unfortunately, if everyone was buying bootlegged zines from these ripoff artists, that meant they weren't buying them from the people who'd published them. In my case, that meant I didn't make back what I put into the zines, and a big chunk of the printer bill came out of my salary - I had to work overtime to pay for the zine. So, I shut the press down. I didn't mind losing money on a zine when everyone played fair, but when someone else made money based on my hard work, and I had to work overtime to make up the difference? The simplest way to avoid being bootlegged is to not publish at all, and so I closed down Pursuit Press.[3]

In September 2010, Walsh announced a plan for a series of small size, short press-run commemorative zines, to mark various milestones in her fannish career, planned to culminate with a final zine in August 2012, on the 35th anniversary of her first zine. [4] This, however, did not occur.

In The Publisher's Own Words

From Walsh's webpage, now offline:

In 1977, multimedia zines were not common. In fact, in the circles I travelled at that point in time, anything other than Star Trek was considered blasphemous ... Star Wars really altered the landscape. ... Star Wars ... opened the floodgates, and new and varied fandoms soon sprang up, like Starsky and Hutch (one of my favorites), Man from U.N.C.L.E. (another favorite), Space: 1999 (yet another), and more. It wasn’t that these other fandoms hadn’t spawned fans and fiction, it was there didn’t seem to be an organized locus to the fandoms. With the general acceptance of Star Wars as a bona fide fandom, these other fandoms had an environment in which they could flourish, and not simply exist just under the radar.

So it was into this fannish environment that I first started publishing fanzines. I’d already published my novella Catch the Final Sunrise! under the press name Alpha Designs Limited, but that was kind of unwieldy and pretentious, and didn’t really reflect where I wanted to go with the new multimedia zine. So taking part of the novella’s name and combining it with part of the multimedia zine’s name, I came up with Moonrise Press, and stuck with it for several years. The first publication of Moonrise Press was Moonbeam, what became a themed multimedia zine.

Chronological Publication History

Alpha Designs Limited (1977)

Moonrise Press (1977 to 1981)

The "Moon" came from "Moonbeam" and the "Rise" came from "Catch the Final Sunrise!.

a May/June 1980 price list for "Moonrise Press"

Pursuit Press (1981-1989)

Vendredi Press (1991 to 2007)

Planned Zines that Were Never Published

Walsh had more information on her website. See My Life in Fandom - Deb Walsh's Zines - Planned Titles That Didn't Happen, Archived version. Also see Proposed Zines.

  • Day of Disappearance (Without a Trace)
  • Dreamplane (Earth 2)
  • Falconer (Star Wars)
  • Gaslight (mystery)
  • Ghyste Mortua (Tanith Lee) -- see more about this zine at TPTB's Involvement and Interference
  • Green Light!
  • It Won't Be Easy (Star Cops)
  • Season in Hell
  • The Loner Collected
  • The Night Watch
  • The PITS Review ("a War of the Worlds zine - the H.G. Wells novel, 1953 film, and 1988-1989 Paramount series - before, during, beyond and alternative")
  • (Whatever Strikes Your) ... Fancy
  • Wunderkind
  • Zero Point Module

References

  1. ^ [citation reference link removed by Deb Walsh].
  2. ^ No More Zines? :-( (Aug 15th, 2007)
  3. ^ About B7 Complex, Archived version.
  4. ^ New Zines?
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