Fouler
An early 1970s fanzine published in the UK by Greg Pickersgill with assistance from Leroy Kettle ("even though he was listed as 'editor' he did little other than lettercolumn responses"). Apart from the editors, contributors included Ian Maule, Ian Williams, Peter Roberts, Rob Holdstock, Richard I. Barycz and John Nielsen Hall.
It had a reputation for iconoclasm, the free use of swear-words, and a general attitude of disrespect; these were met with dismay by some older fans, but it proved very popular with many fans of its editors' generation, a good number of whom went on to become leading fans of the 1970s (as indeed did Kettle and Pickersgill) – see Ratfandom. Pickersgill's fanzine review column, "Heap", earned him an immediate reputation as a savagely honest fan critic.
John D. Berry described it in Focal Point v3n1 as
...a sloppy, angry, whimsical fanzine that has drawn more response from its 50-person mlg list than almost any other fanzine. FOULER is the closest to a focal point that British fandom has, yet it's an adolescent focal point, filled with excesses for the sake of excess.
Dave Langford later wrote:
Like so many seminal things, [Fouler] combined potency and potential with considerable messiness [...] Greg and co-editor Roy Kettle provided a rallying point -- they showed it could be done and that fandom did not have to be the cloying, backpatting, pseudo-nice thing which emerges from British zines of the late '60s (say).
It entered suspension in summer 1971 when Pickersgill moved from Wales to London, with one final issue over a year later.
| Issue | Date | Pages | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | September 1970 | 14 | There was no issue #1: "we thought this was an enormously clever brilliant new idea that would shock and surprise the dullwitted fandom of the day". |
| 3 | October 1970 | 34 | |
| 4 | December 1970 | 34 | |
| 5 | March 1971 | 34 | |
| 6 | June 1971 | 34 | |
| 7 | September 1972 | 32 | Final issue |
Greg Pickersgill's Fanzinography - an annotated listing on his website. Contains biblioraphy, some memoirs and scans of title pages (empty except #2 as they also seemed to pretend they were stapled backwards)
| Publication | 1970—1972 |
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