GRUE

from Fancyclopedia 2

(Grennell) Probably will prove one of the fanzines of history. Its complete genesis is worth quoting as a specimen:

"In casting about for a fanzine title, I considered several: STELLAR STORIES, FIASCO, and GRUE, THE FAN'S MAGAZINE [quasi, True, The Man's Magazine, published about this time], were three I kept coming back to. I discovered that my sneaky subconscious had picked up the first from an ad in Other [ptui!] Worlds. I asked the advice of friend-and-mentor Bob Silverberg and he opined that either FIASCO or GRUE would act as a deadly blight on a fanzine... in fact, why did I want to cast yet another effort into a field already sadly overcrowded? Despite this, perhaps even because of it, I clung to GRUE as a title. Sometime in January of 1953 I drew up a tentative cover for it, bearing a picture of a little man in a spacesuit standing beside his rocket in a moon-crater, about to light a fuse trailing out the bottom of it. I stuck this to the wall for a while and later, as I finished writing a larger-than-usual letter to someone, I put the cover picture on the front of the letter, stapled it down the left margin, and so GRUE was born. [Trumpets off.]

"So went the first fourteen copies; all custom-made, with hand-drawn illos, tipped-in photos, etc. Number fifteen was a four-page kind of one-shot done on a spirit duplicator . 16&17 reverted to typed originals again and when I got into FAPA in the fall of 1953 I decided to keep the title as a FAPAzine, so it appeared there as #18. All issues since then have been consecutively published -- from 20 onwards with the use of Gestetner in blue on white. There have been a few custom issues of GRUE since then, but these are given fractional numbers to fit them in between the published issues, as 'GRUE #25 1/2'." -- Dean Grennell.