BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY

NO 57. FORTY YEARS OF SHOVELLING IT

t wasn’t just the Beatles, you know. On Merseyside in the 1960s another group of irreverent young men coalesced around an iconoclastic idea, and with rather more intellectual heft than the admittedly slightly better-known, and better-earning, moptops. (They also retained their sense of humour for longer than the fabled quartet.) We speak of magazine, which in one form or another ran for more than 40 years until 2009 (its exact date of birth “depends whether you date its origins with the which started in 1965; with John Harney taking over its editorship and change to in 1966; or with the founding of the original in January 1968,” noted Peter Rogerson in a retrospective in 99, the final print issue). Having started as a UFO sheet, its remit had expanded by the late 1970s to cover related folklore and social phenomena, and so proper, as it were, was born, with John Rimmer, who’d joined after the first couple of issues of , taking over the editorial reins. It and its predecessors are all pretty much complete online, and you can start hunting through the history at . There’s hardly anything there that’s not worth reading, unless you’re