The Fantasy Fan, Volume 2, Number 5, January 1935

In January 1935, a seventeen-year-old named Charles Hornig published a sixteen-page magazine from his bedroom. It had a circulation of 300 copies, printed on cheap paper, mailed to a scattered network of weird fiction enthusiasts across the country. This was "The Fantasy Fan," and it was something new: a fanzine made by fans, for fans, in the era when science fiction and fantasy fandom barely existed as a community. This issue features two poems from H.P. Lovecraft's haunting sonnet cycle "Fungi from Yuggoth" - "The Key" and "Homecoming" - alongside fiction and essays from legends like Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Here are the letters pages where readers debated theLatest stories, the amateur poetry, the earnest reviews. This is fandom in its rawest form, before conventions, before organized clubs, before anyone called it a "genre" - just a handful of young writers and readers reaching across distance to build something together. For anyone interested in the origins of modern speculative fiction culture, this is a time capsule from the exact moment it began.