This post is a follow-up on my earlier blog post on my collection of old amateur magazines (APAs).
Thanks to the efforts of a librarian friend of mine, the APAs have been scanned. I’ve set up a separate page on this site with links to those scans.
I won’t claim the collection is complete (it’s not) nor exhaustive (there were many APAs published during that time, at least ten times as many in the NY area alone). These are what I kept in a trunk for three or four decades.
As for the reservations I expressed near the end of that APA blog post:
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I became aware that, while my concerns about publishing old addresses and phone numbers were valid, the cat was already out of the bag. Some of these APAs are already available on the internet from other sources.
In other words, the damage is done. My contribution to the historical record is not going to make anyone’s decades-old personal information less secure than it already is.
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There’s much in these APAs that’s personally embarrassing to me. I decided to leave it as-is, warts and all.
I’m sure there are other contributors to those old APAs who wish they could revise or delete what they wrote back then. However, from my experience working on the biography of Isaac Bonewits, I’ve learned that lots of folks want to make their past “prettier”. I decided to let history (and historians) be the judge, and not withhold the sins of myself and others.
We all have to live with our mistakes.
Now that the activities of role-playing games and gamers in the 70s and 80s are becoming of academic interest, I hope these scans will prove useful to someone.