Letterzine

Letterzines were non-fiction zines that allowed discussion and chat among groups of fans before email, mailing lists, and the Internet were available. These zines printed letters of comment (called LOCs) from subscribers so they could carry out meta discussions, conversations, and what we would now call flame wars, as well as news about the source text and the fan community. Even non-letterzines often had letter columns filled with LOCs.
The earliest use of the term documented in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction is 1950. 
Letterzines were often digest-sized, center-stapled, and averaged between 10 to 50 pages. Some letterzines contained black and white line art, jokes, small bits of fiction, and cartoons, but most were text. The production of a letterzine in the first few decades was a labor intensive process as the editors had to retype every letter before running it through the mimeograph machine. You would often see pleas from editors asking writers to write legibly and correct their own typos. | S&H letterzine issue #10 (1981) Because the circulation of most letterzines was small, the zines were hand stapled or simply folded as editors did not find it cost effective to have them professionally bound.
Subscription costs varied. One example: in 1979, the premiere issue of S&H, the Starsky & Hutch letterzine was free with an SASE, but the cost for additional issues was .50 cents plus a .28 cent legal sized SASE. By 1981, the 40+ page letterzine cost $1.50 per issue. Subscription was capped at 150. Interstat, a Star Trek letterzine similar in size but with a larger subscriber base began charging .50 cents per issue which then increased to $1 per issue by 1983.
A fan in 2016 wrote: 
==List of Letterzines==
For a list, see List of Letterzines.
==A History of Letterzines==
Maggie Nowakowska has written a history of the various Star Wars letterzines operating from 1977 to 1989: 
==And More History==
From K. Langley: 
==Letterzines vs Apazines==
Letterzines are different from apazines in how they are collected and dispersed. "An apa is a private letter-writing club. The members send their letters to the editor, who collates them and sends everyone a copy in the form of a little zine. Only those who participate regularly (there's usually a specific rule about how often you have to contribute) get a copy. A letterzine, by contrast, is available to everyone and not just the contributors." from Judith Proctor's site 
A fan in 1984 wrote: 
In 1993, Sandy Herrold explained the difference between an APA and a letterzine, in the context of the Virgule-L slash mailing list:
Some fans also distinguished between letterzines and APAs by limiting how much of their contents could be made public. This distinction was not so much a legal one (certainly principles of fair use could allow subscribers of both to quote excerpts), but rather a social one. In the 2007 fanzine Legacy documenting Star Trek fandom history, the editors and some of the participants made the decision to quote, using a fan's first name and last name initial, or sometimes just a first name, from letterzines, but to not quote from APAs:
==Some Places to Find Letterzines Now==
A few letterzines were later put up on the web (typed or scanned); for example, Cousins, a Robin of Sherwood lz devoted to discussing the show from a Wiccan/pagan point of view. Southern Enclave, a Star Wars letterzine also has many issues scanned online.
== Some Notable Letterzines ==
For a list of media letterzines, see List of Letterzines.
* Southern Enclave, the longest running Star Wars letterzine
* Interstat, a Star Trek letterzine that lasted over a hundred and fifty issues 
* Jundland Wastes, an early, influential Star Wars letterzine.
* Halkan Council, an early and hugely important Star Trek lz, that sponsored the first Star Trek Fan Fund and started the Fan Q awards.
* Not Tonight, Spock!, a K/S lz and reviewzine from 1984.
* Quantum Quarterly, a Quantum Leap lz, edited by Christine Mavroudis 
* The Neutral Arbiter, a Blake's 7 lz, edited by Sherri Fillingham & Pat Nussman
* The Horizon Letterzine, also a Blake's 7 lz, ran for at least 21 issues from 1992.
* S and H, a Starsky and Hutch letterzine by boojums Press & PJ Press that went for thirty-eight issues between 1979-1983. It pretty much documents the birth of this fandom.
==References==
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