While 20th-century fans of pop culture didn’t have the internet on which to wallow around in their feels, they had another method of gathering to analyze, discuss, and even create fanworks for their favorite TV shows: the fanzine.

True to what the name suggests, fanzines were independent magazines that were often handmade and distributed; the practice goes as far back to 1940, when the term was first invented for the zine “Detours” (and, according to creator Louis Russell Chauvenet, replaced the “un-euphonious word ‘fanmag’”). Fanzines were especially popular among science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts, so it’s no surprise that “Star Trek” eventually proved an appealing subject for just such a publication.

The first and arguably best-known “Star Trek” zine was called Spockanalia; Although meant to be a one-shot, it ran for a total of five issues from September 1967 to 1970, as edited by Devra Langsam and Sherna Comerford. Much of what Spockanalia featured would be very familiar to modern fans, from in-depth analytical articles and theoretical essays about the nuances of Vulcan culture (the kids today would probably know this as “meta” and “headcanons,” respectively) to fanfiction where Kirk and Spock go on adventures together.

As was the case with other fanzines, Spockanalia was entirely a labor of love, drafted on a manual typewriter and copied with mimeograph machines. Even creating fanart for the zine was a laborious process — for one thing, they had to be ink illustrations because nothing else could be reproduced on a mimeograph, and for another, finding reference photos from the show itself proved to be incredibly difficult.

“If you wanted a beautiful picture of a character so that you could draw it, you had to get a film clip,” Spockanalia editor Devra Langsram told the audience of “The First Convention And How It Resurrected Star Trek” at Star Trek Mission this past weekend. “When they did the episodes, they filmed them — it wasn’t digital, it was a physical film. And then they chopped lots of pieces out and threw them away, and Gene Roddenberry rescued them and gave some to Bjo [Trimble], who sent them out to people they knew, and they were able to make photos from these negatives. Otherwise, it would be very difficult for you to have a model to draw from. It was just not available.“

All of that effort proved to be successful; Roddenberry himself called Spockanalia “required reading” for his staff, and several cast members and writers, including Leonard Nimoy (who wrote the foreword to the first issue), contributed letters and interviews to the zine.

