APA
Entry updated 22 June 2026. Tagged: Fan, Theme.
An acronym taken from the National Amateur Press Association, an organization founded in 1869 to coordinate the distribution of its members' writings. An APA or apa mailing is a collection of individually produced contributions of which multiple copies – one for each APA member – have been sent to a central editor, usually known as the Official Editor or OE, who then collates them and distributes the assembled result to all contributors. Typically this is a loose pile of pamphlets, but sometimes the individual Fanzines, known as apazines, are stapled or otherwise bound into a single volume.
APAs – the term was most often found used in the plural, and was pronounced as a word – were common in the late nineteenth century but were then known as amateur journalism (later abbreviated as AJ or "ajay"). They became of genre significance with such productions as The Recluse, published in the 1920s by W Paul Cook (1881-1948), which distributed the work of H P Lovecraft and his circle, including Lovecraft's long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (mid-1927 The Recluse; rev October 1933-February 1935 The Fantasy Fan; 1945). The figures involved in APAs like The Recluse soon turned to more formal publishing (see Small Presses and Limited Editions), but younger fans came into the scene. In 1937, Donald A Wollheim founded the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, which produced in FAPA the first sf APA proper. The second was a US spinoff from FAPA: the short-lived Vanguard Amateur Press Association (see VAPA), active from 1945 to 1950. The third, again US-based and founded in 1947, was SAPS, the Spectator Amateur Press Society. British fans imitated the format in 1954 with OMPA, the Off-trails Magazine Publishers Association. There have been hundreds of others, and APAs remained for many decades an important device within Fandom for maintaining affinities and circulating fannish gossip and/or fiction by young writers.
Increasingly since the 1990s, online networking has tended to supplant the APA as a forum; but many remain active. FAPA itself still continues, as does SAPS, though OMPA was moribund by the late 1970s and faded away altogether by the end of the decade. Further continuing APAs include ANZAPA (Australian and New Zealand Amateur Press/Publishing Association), founded in 1968 as APA-A and given its long-term name in 1969, the central editor's title here being OBE for Official Bloody Editor; and WOOF (Worldcon Order Of Faneditors), founded in 1976, which rather than having a fixed membership roster is compiled annually at each Worldcon from contributions provided by any fan who cares to bring or send them, latterly in digital PDF form; the long gap between "mailings" works against any sense of ongoing conversation. The US-based A Women's APA (AWA or AWAPA) began in 1976 with a mixed-sex membership but became women-only from 1978; the corresponding UK organization is The Women's Periodical (TWP), an all-women APA founded in 1982 and still active.
For a number of years from the early 1970s to circa 1983, the variously edited fanzine South of the Moon attempted to catalogue and give details of all current apas. [JC/DRL]
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