I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things after a welcome Christmas and New Year break. I mentioned last week that I had sidelined myself into writing a probably unnecessary article on the history of newsprint rationing during and just after the Second World War (1940-56). Well, that came about because I wanted to write about why newspapers were still dramatically reduced in size all the way to the mid-1950s, and rationing didn't come to an end until December 1956, yet new publications were allowed from 1950 and could use as much paper as they wanted.
(The short answer is the sheer number of newspapers and the scale that they were published at, with some selling up to four million copies daily. That uses a lot of newsprint compared to, say, a comic which might be half the size and might have a weekly circulation that's only a tenth of what a newspaper sells. In cold terms of tonnage of newsprint, periodicals used only a fraction compared to newspapers.)
Anyway, once I'd got that out of my system, I was able to get on with what I was planning to write, which is some notes towards putting together a new comic index. This is something new, not the Valiant or Action projects I've previously mentioned, but is one that I've wanted to do for years. More news at some point.
I had that completed on Monday, and then there was some work needed on an obituary I'd written for The Guardian about sf writer Barry N Malzberg, who sadly passed away in December. It's a shame our broadsheet newspapers have all cut back on publishing obituaries, with the loss of The Independent (now online only and no obituary page) especially felt. The Guardian is no longer a broadsheet and doesn't cover as wide a spectrum any more, although I have also been turned down because they're overstocked. I'm the first to admit that some authors I like are rather niche, but they still deserve to be recognised and remembered. That said, George Zebrowski died on the day after Malzberg and even I thought it not worth while trying to get something in print. (And it would have meant working over Christmas...)
So now I'm back on the next comic book reprint from Bear Alley and trying to get the introductions to volume two written as there are two fairly substantial essays planned for inclusion. I've spent a couple of days chopping down some 15,000 words of notes and turning them into something readable and it will probably take a couple more because I'm going to have to be quite savage.
After that, another essay to write and then, maybe, I can start doing layouts. That should keep me busy well into February.
Pics this week are a few odds and ends picked up over the past couple of months.
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