Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Paperback Quarterly

Twenty years before the turn of the century, I lived in Brownwood, Texas, where I taught at Howard Payne University. Billy Lee, a pharmacist, got the idea of doing a little magazine about paperbacks. Charlotte Laughlin, Billy's wife also taught at HPU. She liked the idea, and so did I.

Billy plunged ahead, and I signed on to help a little. I believe my title was "contributing editor." One thing I did was write letters to authors and ask them for a short interview. Got some wonderful replies from people like Harry Whittington, Bill Gault, and Bruno Fischer. Charlotte and I wrote articles for the magazine, too, but there were other contributors, like Michael Barson and Bill Lyles.

It was primitive in some ways. Photocopied covers were the best we could do, and not great photocopies at that. Billy eventually took color photos of book covers and pasted them into the magazine. Here are a couple of links of interest that Charlotte sent me yesterday. Check 'em out
here and here.

4 comments:

George said...

Boy, does this bring back a lot of memories! I remember reading PAPERBACK QUARTERLY eagerly as soon as an issue arrived. I have a dim memory of writing an article for PQ on Jack Vance. Clearly, this publication was ahead of its time.

Cap'n Bob said...

I don't know why I didn't subscribe after I joined the apa in 1979 unless it was dire poverty at the time. I'm sorry I missed them.

Juri said...

Looks great, Bill. Any chance for a collection of reprints from the magazine?

Unknown said...

Long ago, someone (R. Reginald, I believe) planned to do a hardcover reprint volume. The plans fell through. The "scholarship" is outdated now, and the time has passed.