Summer Dispatches: Andrea Horbinski
Andrea Horbinski was one of five exceptional graduate students to be awarded a $1000 BCNM Summer Research Award. Check out what she's done so far!
This summer I spent a week in the Fred Patten Collection, which is part of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside. Fred was a huge fan of anime, science fiction, and furry fandoms in southern California for more than 30 years and he collected just about everything he could get his hands on related to those interests. I was working in the collection to get further information on the beginnings of anime and manga fandom in the United States. I found a lot of interesting material; in particular, the newsletters Fred edited were a fascinating window into the problems of early anime fandom, and how fan practices evolved in response to them.
The collection is huge, and the fact that I made it through 26 (out of approximately 150) cartons in a week was actually quite a fast clip. I didn't even get a chance to look at any of the approximately 10,000 fanzines Fred donated. There's still more material in the rest of the collection that I'd like to look at, which means that I'm sure I'll be going back before the end of my dissertation research.