In the '40s, '50s, and '60s, science fiction was a nerdy sub-culture that spread primarily through and hand-assembled fanzines.

Lenny Kaye, a guitar player in Patti Smith's band and voracious pop-culture collector, assembled over a thousand of these zines and together with Boo-Hooray press has showcased them in a new book called The Tattooed Dragon Meets The Wolfman.

"The most surprising thing I noticed about the zines was how closely the format---editorials, letters, essays, reviews---paralleled the format of blogs," says co-author Johan Womack.

"All this stuff is proto-blog, proto-Instagram, proto-snark, proto-troll, and naturally, also an active exchange of ideas that motivated some very weird people to do great things in their life," adds co-author Johan Kugelberg.

Two-color printing was rare for zines.

Detail view.

"The themes in the zines are evergreen---what other genres should be of interest to SF readers, if any; whether or not SF writers/novels are hewing to the standards set by the individual reviewer or editor, and whether they should be reviewed accordingly; the social escapades of fans in the SFF world and in the real world, as well," says Womack.

Detail view.

Kugelberg is bullish about the evolution of geekdom. "The nerds of the 20th century have shaped the 21st, for better, for worse," he says. "What we lost, we can probably not know, what was gained is this world we live in."

Detail view.

Many, but not all, science fiction writers of a certain age got their start writing in science fictions zines," says Womack.

"Naturally, it was fascinating to see the baby-steps by people who became giants of letters, and to see the interaction between the big name fans of the time as they were quarreling their way through a aesthetic narrative that is now everywhere." says co-author Kugelberg.

William Gibson and Harlan Ellison started out writing glorified fan fiction before becoming famous and hitting best-seller's lists. Even Roger Ebert published a zine before securing a prestigious byline.

The flourishing of this geeky aesthetic as well as social history can be chronicled through these documents.

The level of artistic skill varied from zine to zine, but the level of passion was consistently high.

Contemporary events like the space race, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Civil Rights Movement were recapitulated with characters on far-off planets.

Tolkein-esqe high fantasy and jungle fiction in the mold of Tarzan novels provided a pastoral pause in a time of technological expansion.

The Tattooed Dragon Meets the Wolfman is available from Boo-Hooray Press.

Even with their crude production values it's hard not to look at these pages, held together with staples, scotch tape, and a pinch social anxiety and feel something has been lost.