British Fantasy Library
The British Fantasy Library or BFL was an organisation founded by Ron Holmes and Nigel Lindsay in 1947 after the dissolution of the British Fantasy Society (BFS). They published an official organ, Booklist, and other titles.
- Booklist online at fanac.org
The British Fantasy Library Handbook says that the BFL 'became a separate organisation [as distinct from the BFS] from January 1947'. It lists 30 members, two-thirds of whom had not been members of the BFS.
In September 1947 the first issue of Ken Slater's Operation Fantast was distributed alongside Booklist and Slater soon started running 'a sort of "bring-and-buy" agency for the BFL's surplus magazines and books'. According to Slater, the original incarnation of Operation Fantast was essentially the liaison department of the BFL. In December Walt Willis saw an advertisement for the BFL in a prozine and wrote off for details. Holmes replied, sending BFL material and a copy of Operation Fantast leading Willis to contact Slater (Rob Hansen, Then).
Holmes dropped out of fandom in 1948 – there are allusions to his circumstances in Booklist #6 – and John Gunn took over Booklist. Lindsay also became less involved and the BFL increasingly became a postal lending library while Operation Fantast became fully independent.
The BFL had offered to distribute fanzines alongside its Booklist and Willis and James White sought to take advantage of this for the first issue of Slant. Receiving no reply to his letters, Willis offered to mail Booklist himself and receive 200 copies and a mailing list on Christmas Day 1948. At this point there were 41 paid up members of the BFL.
An issue of Booklist was distributed alongside Science Fantasy News in May 1949 and a newsletter, British Fantasy Library, was dated December.
See British Fantasy Library membership 1947-1949 for a likely incomplete list of known members up to this point.
It's unclear when the BFL ended as an organisation. It does not appear to have issued publications after 1949 and became just a postal library for books and magazines. There are no known records of members after 1949. Science Fantasy News #5 (Summer 1950) reports that the BFL and old Cosmos Club libraries would be divided among 'various BFL sections'. This included books bought with a donation from United States fans at Cinvention. In Science Fantasy News #10 (Christmas 1951) Jim Donaldson said he had taken on the library from John Gunn about two years previously. There is a page on the BFL in the Operation Fantast Handbook of 1953, giving current organisers as Vera Douglas and William Dawson for magazines and Donaldson for books. Ken Slater described it as 'perhaps the oldest existing organisation of fans in Britain'. An advertisement for what was then called 'The British Fantasy and Science Fiction Library', again giving Douglas's and Dawson's names, appeared in Vector #4 in 1959. It's not clear what happened after that.
As well as Booklist the BFL issued the following largely self-explanatory publications:
- British Fantasy Library Catalogue
- British Fantasy Library Handbook
- British Fantasy Library (a newsletter issued in December 1949)
- Operation Fantast (from 1947 although its connection with the BFL diminishes during 1948)
| Club | 1947—???? |
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