Written by Fred Patten, and published on the LASFS Rex Rotary, July 8, 1965. Intended for Apa L, 38th Distribution, LASFS Meeting no. 1456, July 8, 1965. Address: 1825 Greenfield Ave., Los Angeles, Calif., 90025. Phone: GR 3-6321.

The reason this issue of RR is being typed in a Trimble typeface is that the WesterCon isn't over for me yet, and I'd better get this done now if I do not want my string of unbroken appearances in Apa L to be broken. It is now Wed. the 7th, and we're temporarily over at Chez Trimbles during an interlude from a Disneyland expedition, having been forced out by the biggest crowds I have ever seen there. 'We' includes Bruce & Dian Pelz, Charlie & Marsha Brown, Jim & Doreen Webbert, and myself; also over at the Trimbles (besides two new fluffy kittens) is Ed Wyman, looking rounder & healthier than I've ever seen him before.

I got home from the Edgewater Inn late Monday evening, after seeing Joe & Felice Rolfe off at the Airport, and was too tired to do more than answer a couple of fairly important letters before going to bed. Yesterday evening, when I'd planned on getting RR done, the Trimbles, Browns, Webberts, Pelz all came over to unload Art Show hangings (which are customarily stored in our garage), and what with showing slides and going out to Baskins-Robbins and all, it was after midnight before I got to bed anyway. Today, we'll be at Disneyland until midnight. That leaves tomorrow evening after work (approximately 5:45-7:30) to do RR, and if things go as usual, I'll probably have Tom Gilbert over to run over at least Milt Stevens' zine, plus Bill Blackbeard and Ellie Turner to publish their own; I know darn well I'll never get anything finished if I wait until then to start the typing itself. Hence a couple of pages cut cold now.

Today's trip was hastily scheduled during the Con, with the idea of getting together after the Con when we could think in peace to work out the details. We only knew it would be Wednesday; which was fine by me, as I'd previously sounded out my immediate boss at the Library a bout taking a day off this week for the inevitable Disneyland trip, and he said fine, as long as it's not Tuesday. So I show up to work Tuesday and the head Librarian promptly announces a Staff Meeting for this morning. Great! Well, Staff Meetings seldom last past 9 a.m. and Disneyland doesn't open until 10 anyway, so I arranged with Bruce & Jim that I'd meet them in front of my Library at 9, and we'd all leave from there for Disneyland in Jim's Econoline. Everything worked out fine, and we got to Disneyland about 10:15 -- to find out that it'd actually opened at 9 a.m. Lucky for me we didn't know the new hours beforehand, or I might've ended up having to drive down by myself. Though actually, since we aren't making the Grand Tour -- the Browns and Webberts have all been there before -- we don't need the whole day, anyway.

[Next day -- back at the old shop. Well, I should have time for one stencil this afternoon. Shift to past tense.]

Since we weren't making the Grand Tour, we headed immediately for the new attractions that'd been added since the Browns & Webberts were last at Disneyland. Unfortunately, these were among the most popular in the park -- the Flying Saucers, the Matterhorn, etc. -- and with those bigger-than-ever crowds, the lines were ridiculous. So along about 3:30 we all got our hands stamped and adjourned to the Trimbles' for a barbecue dinner. We all returned to Disneyland -- Trimbles included -- at 9_00, to find the crowds gone, so we got more done in the last three hours than we had in the whole earlier part of the day. All in all, it was a successful day. I've been there so often that the individual rides don't have much special appeal for me any more; it's the overall atmosphere of joyfulness and relaxation that makes it worth returning to again and again -- especially when someone's along who's never been there before.

Well, we got THE BEST FROM APA L out in time for the WesterCon, but it was a close race. Tom and I got something like 3 hours or less of sleep per night for the last couple of days preceding the Con, and I didn't average much better for the whole week before that, with so many of the stencils Tom had typed earlier to run off. The job was supposed to be an equal division of labor, with Tom typing the 100+ stencils and me publishing them; in actuality, Tom did most of the work, since I have an 8-hour job that takes up most of my day, while Tom's on Summer Vacation right now. So if Tom hasn't been appearing in the weekly Distributions lately, that doesn't mean he hasn't been working on Apa L; and I'd like to thank him for pitching in and taking over part of my share of the work when it became obvious that I wouldn't have time to do it all.

But the job is done. THE BEST FROM APA L is a hefty 124 pages, even without some of the material we'd have especially liked to get in -- such as ditto artwork by Bĵo, more illustrations for "Over the Sea to Skye", and some of the reviews of the Bradbury plays, to name a few. We ran off 125 copies; o f these, 65 have already been sold, both by prepublication order and by table sale at the WesterCon. This is about what we'd expected, and pretty much pays off our expenses; from here on, whatever Tom & I take in is profit. I'll be taking a few copies to London for the WorldCon and I'll take orders there when the ones I bring run out; after that, we'll just sell 'em a few here, a few there, until they've finally gone. We're in no hurry.

On the whole, I'm quite happy with how the anthology came out, considering we were still cutting stencils until the day before the Con, and ended up having to just slap it together with no real planning beforehand as to the order in which the different articles should go. This meant that I had to give up my dream of dividing everything into "Departments", and running each Dep't on a different colored paper. (We did get the discussion on Randism/Objectivism organized into one Dep't, though.) And with so much white paper, I had to agree with Tom that the colored cover reprints would look better scattered around to break up the color monotony, rather than collected together in one Art Dep't. Possibly next year we can get started far enough in advance to do it my way, if only for variety. As it says in the Editors' Statement, we are planning to issue THE BEST FROM APA L annually for as long as Apa L exists, as an advertisement for the LASFS, among other reasons. Even if Apa L should fold within the next couple of months, which it shows no signs of doing, we'll still have enough for a BEST FROM APA L: 1966.

I see that Redd Boggs is writing personal LoC's on Apa L zines, which is great except that I don't have time for personal correspondence any more, so please excuse me if I don't answer you too often in kind.