Bert Lewis

Bert Lewis c.1943, courtesy of Rob Hansen.

(May 7, 1906 – ????)

Bert Lewis was a UK fan from Preston active in from 1930s through to at least the 1970s. He attended the Midvention in 1943 and Loncon I and was a member of the Science Fiction Association (SFA), British Fantasy Society (BFS) and later the BSFA. A notable collector and general bibliophile, he lived in a house called 'Carthoris', named for the son of John Carter and Dejah Thoris in the Barsoom stories.

Lewis joined the SFA although it's unclear when as in January 1939 he is noted as rejoining but there was no notification of him joining in the first place. In a profile in Futurian War Digest #27 he said

I was born in a little village in North Staffordshire ... in 1906 and was always keen on anything appertaining to the bizarre or unusual ... I progressed through Haggard and Burroughs until in 1928 I got a peep at Amazing with Seaton learning to 'fly' with a weird affair like a poker. After that it was hopeless to try and turn back; now, I have to creep in at the back door when I get any new books and hide them for a while, & later try to take them into my library as if they had really come from there originally, otherwise I'd go out on my neck, followed by an assortment of fantasy books in the region of 800 and about a hundredweight of magazines bound into volumes. Which of course would be a bit heavy all at once on one's neck.

Editor J. Michael Rosenblum added that among his outside interests were Home Guard, guitar playing – and teaching – and 'his record library competes vigorously with his wonderfully-looked-after science fiction collection'.

Lewis appeared in Novae Terrae #25 in 1938 disagreeing with D. R. Smith and by #29 he was being described as a 'famous fan' when he attended a Christmas supper of the London branch of the Science Fiction Association. J. Michael Rosenblum said he was 'one of Britain's foremost Sciencefictional Bibliophiles' in The Futurian v2#4, a fanzine to which Lewis contributed book reviewers. He continued the practice in Futurian War Digest starting with its second issue. At the Midvention he took part in the debate, proposing the motion that 'there should be no precise line of demarcation between s-f and Fantasy' while Terry Overton opposed.

He is listed in Ron Bennett's Directory of Science Fiction Fandom for 1955 but not in later editions, although he was a member of Loncon I in 1957. He reappears in the BSFA's Vector in the 1960s, with his name being added to the membership list at some point between 1960 and 1963. He contributed two short stories, one to Vector and one to Tangent, and was noted as writing to the Vector editor through to the mid-1970s.

During the Second World War he was engaged in essential government work and so while he was emphatically not a pacifist he was not allowed to join the forces.

Walt Daugherty's Directory of Fandom of 1943 neatly conflates his name and address to list him, rather grandly, as Bert Lewis Carthoris.

• Bert Lewis in Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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