Alembic

The Alembic, 'an occasional miscellany for fantasy fans', was a fanzine published by Norman Ashfield of Thornton Heath in south London, UK in the late 1940s. Other contributors included Ken Slater, Mike Tealby and Cedric Walker.

In its first issue Ashfield said:

This fanzine owes its existance to the splendid example of Operation Fantast and if it can bask in a little of 0F's reflected glory, your editor will be happy.

He also said:

An Alembic is the Alchemist's distillation apparatus; I intend The Alembic to help clear my views (and yours also) – in the same way as liquids are purified by distillation. (That's why this first issue is rather a mixup).

Walt Willis explained in Pamphrey #3 (October 1956) that in early 1948 he received an issue of Ken Slater's Operation Fantast but:

More important to me than OF, as it turned out, was one of its enclosures... the first issue of Norman Ashfield's Alembic. It was just two duplicated foolscap pages, stapled together in the top lefthand corner. It was this that started me off as a fanzine publisher, for Madeleine held it up and said, 'Surely you could do better than that.'; and I thought maybe I could. I hope this doesn't hurt Norman's feelings. It wasn't that we had such a contempt for Alembic, it was rather that it was more our sort of thing than OF had been. OF had had news items and all sorts of proper magazine stuff, whereas Alembic was just comments and general talk by Norman. Besides this was only the second fanzine I'd seen, and it made me realise that there was no closed shop.

Issue	Date	Pages	Notes
1	April 1948	4
2	October 1948	8
2.1 #3	Summer 1949	4	Includes 8 page supplement
2.2 #4	Winter 1949	10

Alembic online at fanac.org

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Publication

1948—1949

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