Shavertron: The Mimeograph Years - Paperback

by Richard Toronto (Author)

Science fiction fan clubs have cranked out thousands of fanzines since Ray Palmer mimeographed the very first in 1930. Out of these thousands, only three were dedicated to the science fiction phenomenon known as the Shaver Mystery. There was a reason for this: SF fandom blackballed the Shaver Mystery and its namesake, Richard S. Shaver from the sci-fi community.

The first Shaver Mystery fanzine to enter this hostile environment was the original Shaver Mystery Magazine, edited by Richard Shaver. He typeset it and even printed it himself on an offset press. It ran for nine issues (a 10th is rumored to exist) between 1947 and 1949.

The Shaver Mystery Club Letterzine followed shortly after. Mimeographed by a small group of Shaver Mystery fans, it produced 16 issues. By 1950, Dick Shaver had abdicated his role as leader of the Shaverism movement. Without Shaver and his Shaver Mystery Club to support the fan base, Shaver Mystery fanzines died out.

Or so everyone thought. Fast forward to California, 1979, the year the first issue of Shavertron: Your Only Source of Post-Deluge Shaverania rolled off a mimeograph machine. The world had radically changed in the 29 years since the last Shaver Mystery fanzine saw print. Richard Shaver was dead and the disco era was well underway.

A young fanzine editor named Richard Toronto began to redefine the Shaver Mystery for a post-modern era. Shavertron became the longest-lived Shaver Mystery fanzine, with 29 issues to its credit. Out-of-print for nearly 25 years, this rarity of the Shaver Mystery genre is now reprinted in four volumes for the discriminating collector.

Author Biography

In 1972 Richard S. Shaver opened a letter from an inquisitive California kid named Richard Toronto. As the story goes, Shaver's reply changed Toronto's life forever. For the next four years until Shaver's death in 1975, Toronto enrolled in Shaver's rock book correspondence course, where Shaver encouraged him to photograph rocs and become a writer. A few years after Shaver's death, Toronto founded Shavertron, a fanzine for Shaver Mystery buffs. In time it gathered a cult following, keeping Shaver's memory alive for 29 issues from 1979 to 1992 as "The Only Source of Post-Deluge Shaverania." It took another 35 years before Toronto wrote the book that became Shaver's first published biography: War Over Lemuria. Since its publication in 2013, Toronto's California-based Shavertron Press has produced several ground-breaking new works on Shaver and the Mystery. ROKFOGO, a two-volume set devoted entirely to Shaver's Outsider Art career of painting and photography, was the first of its kind. The Shavertron collection, Toronto says, is his farewell to Shaver, as he plans to gafiate from the Shaver Mystery in 2014. Toronto attended San Francisco and Sacramento State Universities, graduating in 1994 with a BA in Journalism. He worked in the Arts in Mental Health program at Napa State Hospital in Napa, California, where he taught photography to the criminally insane. He also covered the arts and entertainment beat, among others, as a reporter for a suburban daily newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first magazine article about Richard S. Shaver appeared in Beyond Reality magazine in 1976. In 2002 he converted Shavertron to an E-zine, where it can be found at www.shavertron.com to this day.