Fantast (Medway)
Fantast (Medway) Ltd was a British SF mail-order bookselling business run by Ken Slater from the mid-1950s until his death in 2008. It grew out of his earlier bookselling ventures as part of Operation Fantast.
Tony Thorne explained the genesis of the name in a letter published in Relapse 13 (February 2009). Thorne and Slater knew each other through Operation Fantast and Thorne was already operating a shop, Medway Science & Fantasy Centre Bookshop, in Gillingham, one of the towns by the mouth of the River Medway in Kent. They planned to go into partnership and Thorne engaged a local (to him) lawyer to set up the company. Finding an already existing "Fantast Limited" – Thorne said they never did find out who it was – the lawyer added "(Medway)" to the name. However, shortly afterwards Thorne experienced a change of professional circumstances and so rather than Fantast (Medway) Ltd being a business with two bases, Thorne resigned as a director and Slater operated alone, initially out of Syston in Leicestershire, about 150 miles away from anywhere associated with the River Medway. He moved to the Wisbech area in Cambridgeshire around 1956.
It's unclear when the Fantast (Medway) name was first used although catalogues were certainly issued from January 1955 and possibly slightly earlier. A catalogue dated September 1955 was numbered "8" and one in October "9" so there's a good chance that the January 1955 catalogue, the existence of which is mentioned in an unnumbered February iteration, was the first. These catalogues are inevitably mostly given over to lists of books and magazines but also included a degree of sf publishing and fan news.
Slater and his wife Joyce were fixtures of convention dealers' rooms for decades and in early years they were the dealers' room, and often not even that with their tables being located at the back of the convention hall. Joyce died in 1995 and Ken continued alone, often assisted by his daughter, Susie Haynes. Greg Pickersgill wrote in an email list review of Seacon03, the 2003 Eastercon:
It's a pleasure too to see the old stagers like Ken Slater looking so ruff and tuff; ok, he may not be staying up all night knocking back the bottles of rum like he used to, but in his mid-eighties he can do a full days work in the bookroom and carry his own damned stock out at the end of the convention. Personally I'll be glad to live to his age, and certainly don't expect to be so fit, mentally and physically, as he is.
After his death in 2008, Haynes carried on the business in a limited way as Fantast Three (as it was the third incarnation of the Fantast name after Operation Fantast and Fantast (Medway) Ltd). Ansible 419 (June 2022) reported that she had "sold off her stock of genre books and will close down the no longer financially viable US magazine import service (Analog, Asimov's, F&SF) after sending the July/August issues to subscribers."
- Sample Fantast (Medway) Ltd catalogues online on the "Operation Fantast" page at fanac.org
| Store | 1955—2022 |
| This is an SF bookstore page. When a floreat "fl." is listed it records the dates for which we have evidence and may not be the store's entire span. |