Another wonderful issue of one of my favorite 'zines landed in my mailbox today. This is No. 62 of The Mystery and Adventure Series Review, published by Fred Woodworth. Fred has been steadily putting out multiple publications since 1969. He does this entirely without use of digital equipment of any kind. Instead, he uses analog offset printing presses and associated gear of the sort that I remember from my teen years, working in my father's print shop in the 1980s. It's painstaking and skilled work, made more challenging by the fact that supplies for the printing process are becoming difficult or impossible to obtain. To overcome the obstacles, Fred turns to his endless resourcefulness to improvise solutions for each problem. I'm astonished by his technical and typographic knowledge, and his unstoppable drive to publish his catalog of 'zines.
This 'zine ostensibly focuses on boy's series books, but delves into many literary and typographic topics. On top of all that, Fred has been publishing a novel which has been serialized over several past issues in the manner of Charles Dickens in the mid 1850s. This issue of the Review contains the final chapters of The Sunken City, a Tom Quest novel. The anachronistic charm of every aspect of this magazine really gets me where I live. I've been a subscriber for over a decade now, and while the years are piling up for Fred, I hope he continues for many more.
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