AVON FANTASY READER CHECKLIST

MIRAGE

Vol. 1, No. 8

June, 1966

Editor and Publisher: Jack Chalker

Cover: David Prosser

Pages: 52

Cover price: 3 issues/$1.00 (Subscription price)

Subtitled, "The Amateur Magazine of Fantasy", Chalker's fantasy fanzine was mimeographed and featured the works of authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, Robert E. Howard, E. Hoffman Price and others. Content was a mix of articles, fiction and bibliographies. It was nominated for a Hugo Award for best fanzine.

The first issue was titled CENTAUR (1960) and the second, KALEIDOSCOPE (1960), becoming MIRAGE with issue #3. In later years, the title would become the name of Chalker's publishing company, Mirage Press.

Standouts in this issue are a chronology of Clark Aston Smith's work, an Avon Fantasy Reader checklist and a discussion of Fairyland by Lovecraft. There is a poem by Gerald W. Page, who later would purchase the semi-pro 'zine COVEN 13 from Arthur H. Landis and rename it WITCHCRAFT AND SORCERY.

CONTENTS

Over The Edge: The Viet-Nam Syndrome

The White Whale's Race by Ray Trevino

Clark Ashton Smith: A Chronology by Donald Fryer

Sea Nymph by Laurence R. Griffin

Avon Fantasy Reader: A Checklist by George F. Ralston

Some Backgrounds Of Fairyland by H. P. Lovecraft

Books: Quinn, REH, & An lndex

Hindsight! by Fryer, Gold, & Price

Poems by Gerald W. Page, George F. Ralston, and H.S. Weatherby

From Jack Chalker's "A Short History Of Baltimore Fandom":

"Mirage evolved out of my earlier fanzine, Centaur. My second issue was called Kaleidoscope 2, but it had no title on the cover, as I had announced a contest for a permanent title. K2 couldn't have been more different from Centaur; this time August Derleth was the big influence, and the fanzine was very Lovecraftian in content. K2 was printed by Don Studebaker, and took some time to get out since I actually had to pay for supplies this time. I was very surprised by the positive reaction to it; I picked Mirage as the 'winner' for its permanent name (which had been suggested by a Sears & Roebuck salesman and would-be horror writer from Knoxville, Tennessee, named Gene Tipton) and decided to go with the 'serious and constructive' path that K2 had taken rather than the 'same-old same-old' of Centaur. The cover was drawn by David Prosser, a classical music disk jockey and part-time portrait painter from Ohio whose portraits of great opera stars are in major opera houses across the country. In fact, Prosser did the cover for every issue of Mirage and also designed the distinctive logo for Mirage (which I still use with my Mirage Press publications).

There were eight issues, in all, with the Mirage title. Because it had no competition, it attracted a contributor's list that in retrospect is quite impressive: I published nonfiction by deCamp, Leiber, and others, the first stories of Ed Bryant and Ray Nelson, the last stories of Seabury Quinn and David H. Keller, M.D., poetry by Tim Powers... well, you get the idea. Mirage eventually gained a large enough following and popularity that it was nominated for the Best Fanzine Hugo in 1963. The last five issues were collated at BSFS meetings, the times when the meetings were at my house.. By the end of the run, circulation had reached one thousand copies, so collation was no trivial matter. Actually, everyone who attended had to collate the zines, because otherwise there was no room to sit down and have a business meeting!"