Following on from BigRedX’s V&A Post, I thought I’d do a search based on something I did in the 1990s while at university, and it turns out that the University of Liverpool is sitting on a copy. So that‘s interesting.

They seems to have a few issues. Nice to know that if my archive ever gets destroyed that it’s being cared for elsewhere.

http://link.liverpool.ac.uk/portal/Bert/QRCgbCdpYWU/

Excellent!

What was the fanzine about?

I'm intrigued!

Originally, it started with the intent to run postal Diplomacy games (I had done this before with other people and even had an earlier run with a duplicator doing much this for a few years in the mid 1980s). That ambition tailed off pretty quickly as me (and my friend) found that people were quite happy to buy it for the written and drawn stuff we produced. A lot of it was pretty random insomnia-inspuired stuff that I created, and my friend did his own thing. We also tended to write in a round-robin kind of way, each of us carrying on a story from the previous issue. It kind of tailed off when I finished uni and had to get real work, and the funds I had to prop it up kind of ran out. Sadly, a long bout of post-uni unemployment pretty much killed it off.

Originally it was called Bandersnatch, but we shortened the name to just BerT! (the R being the R in a circle symbol). I still use a domain that was inspired by that - we were going to go all electronic with it and keep it going as website. That’s still an ongoing plan, but other stuff keeps getting in the way. How Mr Biffo manages, I’ll never know.

The Uni Liverpool site lists it as “science fiction” - and I guess it was, though that’s a really, really loose fit. The whole thing was rambling idiocy. We had various stories based on recurring characters - Mr Measure was obsessed with measuring anything. Simon the Syphoning Squirrel is pretty much self-explanatory, there were letters (all made up), a segment called Peculiar Street Happenings where every day things you’d see out side were explained away as some form of weird supernatural or UFO-related phenomena. I’ve seen TV shows on SyFy and H2 that do much the same job, but on a budget.

I guess at its peak we had almost 100 people buying it.

All done on an Acorn Archimedes with a load of floppy disks. Sadly, original files don’t exist due to BBC-like recycling.

It was a lot of fun to do. Every now and then, I feel I should try to get that part of my imagination out into the wild again.