Talk:Factsheet Five

Verifiability
Is this information about a slanshack in Alhambra at all verifiable? What is verifiable is that for most of the time that Gunderloy published F5, he lived in upstate New York. --Larrybob 20:37, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I personally attended parties there, watched Gunderloy hand-crank his ditto machine, and helped collate his zines. If that's "original research", I'm sorry, but it's also true.


 * Davidkevin 07:29, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I know this is quite an old conversation, but this lead has always kinda bothered me since @Larrybob is right, it's not verifiable — not even in the head of Issue 1 which I have scanned from the archive in Albany. There's no mention of Alhambra nor a slanshack. He did write another zine called Accumulations out of Alahambra, which was distributed to other APAs, but by the time F5 launched he seemed to be living in Massachusetts. Is it possible, @Davidkevin, that you are confusing F5 with another zine he was making before he moved? F5archive (talk) 16:58, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * The house was called BTLE (Beyond the Leading Edge). By October 1982, when I joined LASFS and thereby became aware of Gunderloy, his contributions to APA-L listed his address as BBBTLE, for Boston Branch BTLE.  (When BTLE was evicted a couple of years later, he dropped that.)  I now have no way of reconstructing when he left Boston. —Tamfang (talk) 02:55, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Interesting! Gunderloy references his house in Medford, MA as "Superlative Manor (aka BBBTLE)" in F5 #4 (Sept. 1982). This is a different address, however, from Issues 1-3, which was listed as Hyde Park, MA. Issue 1 was "begun" there on May 4; #2 on May 29; #3 on July 19 -- these first issues were short and produced very quickly. F5archive (talk) 15:46, 14 March 2023 (UTC)


 * What's a slanshack? -- Two Halves
 * My assumption is that it's a roommate situation involving Science Fiction fans, probably named after the A. E. van Vogt novel Slan... but someone who knows more about SF fandom should probably make that redline into an article.--Larrybob 03:29, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Yep. The term was fading from use when I came along. I believe it was originally the name of a specific household (the Slanshack) but became generic. —Tamfang (talk) 00:14, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Ah here we go. —Tamfang (talk) 00:16, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Now I think it was South Pasadena or San Marino, not Alhambra. —Tamfang (talk) 04:13, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Various info
I've added a little bit how Hudson Luce took over after Issue #44 (which was August 1991, not 1990). I'm not positive when R. Seth Friedman took over, as I don't have Issue #46. Also the electronic version was Factsheet Five - Electric, not Electronic. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 06:44, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Note of potential conflict of interest
I don't really know if this would constitute a potential conflict of interest or not, but just to be extra cautious, I wrote some reviews for Factsheet Five (unpaid) when it was in San Francisco and know Seth Friedman personally. So take my edits with appropriate grains of salt. Msalt (talk) 18:09, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Changes re: Hudson Luce era
Acknowledging my personal involvement, I still think it's pretty obvious that the recent addition of information about the Hudson Luce era at Factsheet Five is way over the top. You have a long paragraph about the people behind one single issue of the magazine, and just half a sentence about the 19 issues over 6 years when the magazine presumably had its widest circulation.

Furthermore, the phrase "during a time of great hype for the genre" is pretty loaded and non-encyclopedic. I'm going to remove it immediately for POV, and invite discussion about the Luce information -- but I'm inclined to cut that back unless someone can offer a good reason for that much detail. Msalt (talk) 18:17, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I think the detail about Luce is fine, the problem is that there's not enough about the zine under Gunderloy and Friedman. The fact that there's not enough coverage about them doesn't mean the Luce info should be cut down, it's just a short paragraph after all.  I'm not sure, but I think Luce's FF archives are also held by the NYSL. Шизомби (talk) 18:49, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I hear what you're saying, and I could see expanding all 3 if the notability of the subject warranted it, but I think that might be open to discussion. Some parts of the Luce detail are unsupportable though, IMHO.  I just don't see what the different cities he was located in adds, and this line -
 * "When a man named Hudson Luce, located in Atlanta, heard online that Gunderloy was finished with the magazine of magazines, he "
 * -- in my opinion, doesn't add anything substantial compared to simply "Hudson Luce". IE "Hudson Luce purchased the rights to it....".  Similarly, in the last sentence, I think that cutting "Luce relocated to Cincinnati, then St. Louis, then passed the operation on to " and starting with R. Seth Friedman, tells the same story much more succinctly. Msalt (talk) 21:02, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I tightened the language without removing the detail about Luce's collaborators, and added a couple of bits from that existing source about the Friedman years. If you find the info on the Luce era archives, that would be good to add too. Msalt (talk) 21:56, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Comment by Hudson Luce
Thanks to whoever is doing this. This is Hudson Luce, so I'll try to add some clarification here and some detail. I'm working from my archival copy of Issue 45, since the computer archives of the articles, saved in Stuffit 1.5.1 format, are apparently unrecoverable; not even on my G3 Powerbook running Mac OS 8.6. Here's a bit about how I "bought" Factsheet Five:

"This all began late last July, when Mike Gunderloy announced on the WELL, an electronic bulletin board, that he was ceasing publication of Factsheet Five with issue #44... On the 3rd of August, I proposed to continue Factsheet Five for the cost of sending issues to the paid subscribers for the time remaining on their subscriptions, and to continue the editorial policy of non-exclusion of reviewing materials, in other words, to review materials received without regard to their content, political or otherwise. Mike and Cari [Goldberg, his co-editor] accepted, and I became the new editor and publisher of Factsheet Five."

The people who worked with me on the magazine are as follows:

Without the work of the people above, the production of Issue 45 would have been impossible. I got it mailed out finally on December 20, 1991, bundling all the issues and sorting them myself, after working 20 hours straight to get address labels on all of them. By hand. Ten days later, my aunt died, and as I was her sole survivor, I had to take care of the burial and funeral by myself, alone, and then I had to probate her estate. Doing this from Atlanta would have been prohibitively expensive, so I simply packed up and moved to Kansas City so I could do things myself rather than pay lawyers to do it. I shipped about 1000 lbs of zines to the apartment, along with all my stuff, put a forwarding order in at the Post Office, and got back to Kansas City on January 5, 1992. I also put up my new mail address on the WELL, and the mailbox got stuffed everyday to the point where I got all my mail, all 40 lbs daily, in a special box. The phone would have continued to ring off the hook, but I didn't give out the number. So in addition to all the legal stuff with my aunt's estate, I had a steady 12 hours of work to do per day, every day, 7 days a week. Some days I just took off, and so the work piled up. When I took over, there were 1152 paid subscriptions, 300 of them Life or Sustaining subscribers, the rest to run out by Issue 50. Of the press run for Issue 44, 10,500 copies printed, Mike had sent out roughly 6000 in trade, sent about 2500 to distributors, and the rest went to subscriptions and single copy sales. I figured out pretty quick that it would be impossible to continue sending copies for trade, especially with a press run of 5000, 1152 which got sent out to subscribers (and between 5% and 25% were returned as undeliverable, depending on the post office. As I recall, Detroit Michigan was the worst performer.) I also had a look at policies for distributors, and they tended to be so bad that sending copies for newsstand sales was at best advertising in order to get subscribers, and definitely a money loser. In light of this, I decided to make FF a subscription-only publication and not deal with distributors except on a Firm Sale/COD basis. We continued to get a steady trickle of new subscribers. There was praise for #45 and there were complaints, especially from NAMBLA, who were angry that I had not reviewed their zines. I had in fact written a review, and for some reason had intended to stick it in the Gay/Lesbian/Queer section, and then proceeded in the process of physically assembling the issue on boards, to omit all reviews after the letter "G", a screwup I didn't catch until after the issue had been printed and it was too late. If I'd done an Issue #46, the reviews would have been included. Fate intervened again, however, because on the 4th of July, 1992, I was out riding my bike, and got run off the road by some guy in a convertible who was avoiding colliding with another car. I went into the ditch, went over the handlebars and landed on my left wrist, and the shock traveled up my arm to the shoulder ball joint, which shattered into 5 pieces, two of which were too small to pin. The orthopedic surgeon on call sent me home in a sling, with a scrip for pain meds, and with the advice that the cartilage would form a natural cast, which is what happened. He also said the arm would end up permanently useless. That didn't happen, because instead of doing the exercises prescribed by the docs, I started lifting weights after about six months. But for Factsheet Five, that pretty much did it. You can't type fast enough with one hand. So at that point I had to find someone else to do the zine, and that's where R. Seth Friedman took it over. I ended up losing money on the zine, not very much, but enough, and I got no compensation for my labor (but no one else got paid, either.) If I'd been physically able to continue, I wanted to produce the magazine wholly on the internet, and would have done so, especially in light of the development of the World Wide Web... but things worked out the way they did. Chris and Paris Rice of Kansas City helped out doing music reviews and Tim Kearns did reviews of all sorts of zines for what would have been Issue 46. After I was injured, they did the physical labor I was unable to do, in shipping out what must have been about 1600 lbs of zines to San Francisco (40 boxes of zines at about 40 lbs/box). --Stream47 (talk) 10:51, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

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