Image of the Day

[randy_byers]

One of the greatest fanzine covers I've ever seen, although I'll grant you I haven't seen that many compared to some. This is Richard Bergeron's cover for Warhoon 26. I'm not sure what year it's from, but perhaps somebody can tell me. Sometime in the '60s, I'm thinking. Three unevenly-spaced staples, you'll notice.

Comments

[replyhazy.livejournal.com]

Scratchboard? but then... how repro'd?

[c-crockett.livejournal.com]

He did a lot of silkscreen. This might have been a direct technique on the silkscreen resist, or a photo-process. I would bet money the staples were spaced to work with the image--they're centred in the red areas--not a failed try at even spacing.

1969, probably.

I was on his mailing list in the early-mid 80s. I was still living at home and my parents thought the Warhoons made their coffee table look very classy.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I think it was litho, but I'm not sure.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Ah, silkscreen. That sounds right, now that you mention it.

[c-crockett.livejournal.com]

So much for my theory, Colin got his copy, and it's quite poorly stapled. The positioning is less optimal than in your copy, although similar, and they didn't all go all the way through to the back-cover. Maybe it wasn't intentional.

[c-crockett.livejournal.com]

Argh. He did do a lot of silkscreen, including possibly an interior illo in this issue, but Colin says the cover looks offset.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should put up a poll: litho, silkscreen, or offset?

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I like to think it was a stoned collation party where things were a bit haphazard when it got to the stapling.

[c-crockett.livejournal.com]

One would hope so!

I was never allowed to help collate any of the Derelict zines; they were really, really, anal about doing it perfectly, and I was a neo. My first collation that was actually social was about '01 or '02 at a Minicon, collating Rune.

[the-maenad.livejournal.com]

That's a gorgeous cover that I've not seen before, my run of Wh lacking that number.

1969 is about right (#27, which I do have, was about then) but I'm not sure Bergeron was silkscreening that early.

And the words "stoned collation party" and "Richard Bergeron" do not go together well; remember that Bergeron was a notorious fannish hermit, making Harry Warner look like a mad party animal...

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Well, it could have been a stoned collation party of one!

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Alpajpuri had some winners, but, yes, I do believe that Warhoon 26 has the best cover in my own fanzine collection.

Publication date from the colophon: February 1969.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Geri. I donated my copy to an auction in the recent past, so I couldn't look up the date myself.

I'm not sure I've seen any of Alpajpuri's covers. Was that Paul Novitski's nom de plume?

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yes; Alpajpuri = Paul Novitski.

The other interesting fact about that Warhoon cover is that it was a last-minute substitution for the 2-page collage cover Bergeron intended to run. The lowest price for engraving and printing that cover ran to $75 and he simply couldn't justify the cost. So he rewrote the first 17 lines of his editorial, recounting the gruesome tale and offering the collage cover art for free to anyone who wanted to pony up the $75 to run it themselves. I wonder if anyone took him up on the offer.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Fascinating question! Might be worth throwing out on fmzfen.

[kim-huett.livejournal.com]

I fear my friend that you have a dud copy. The stapling on my copy of Warhoon #26 is neatly spaced, as it is on every other issue I have in my collection. Ah well, try and look past this deficiency and appreciate what is without a doubt the single most attractive cover to ever front an issue of Warhoon.

My guess by the way is lithograph. He wrote in an earlier issue about sending another piece of art to the printer which makes sense given he was still fully employed at the time and probably didn't have the spare time silkscreen several hundred would require.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I actually like the humanity (oh, the humanity!) of the uneven stapling, but I no longer own this issue anyway. Just the cover scan.

I thought I had read that he used litho a fair amount in that era, but my memory is not to be trusted.