"Mike Resnick - Roots and a Few Vines (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

to be a genius to figure out that _ERB-dom_, at least in that
context, was an obvious reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs.
A whole magazine devoted to one of my favorite writers? I
could barely wait until the next morning, when I took the subway
downtown and entered the Post Office News, Chicago's largest
magazine store. I looked for _ERB-dom_ next to _Time, Life, Look,
Newsweek,_ and _Playboy._ Wasn't there. I looked for it next to
_Analog, Galaxy,_ and _F&SF._ No dice. Wasn't anywhere near
_Forbes_ or _Fortune_ or _Business Week_ either.
So I go up to the manager and tell him I'm looking for _ERB-
dom_, and he checks his catalogs and tells me there ain't no such
animal.
I grab him by the arm, drag him over to the paperbacks, pull
out the operative Burroughs title, turn to the inside front cover,
and smite him with a mighty _"Aha!"_
So he promises to get cracking and find out who publishes
this magazine and start stocking it, and I return to our
subterranean penthouse (i.e., basement apartment) to await the
Good News.
Which doesn't come.
I nag Post Office News incessantly. I nag my local bookstore.
I nag the public library. I even nag my mother. (This seems
counter-productive, but she has been nagging _me_ for 20 years and
fair is fair.)
Finally, I look at my watch and it is half-past 1962 and
there is still no sign of _ERB-dom_, so I write to the editor,
Miss Cazedessus (so okay, until then I'd never heard of a _guy_
named Camille), in care of Ace Books, and a month later the first
five issues of _ERB-dom_ arrive in the mail, the very first
fanzines I have ever seen, along with a long, friendly letter that
constantly uses the arcane word "worldcon".
Within two months I have written three long articles for
_ERB-dom #6_ and have become its associate editor. There is a
worldcon in Chicago that summer, not a 20-minute subway ride from
where we live, but the future Campbell winner chooses August 17 to
get herself born, and we do not go to the worldcon. When she is 8
days old I decide to forgive her and lovingly show her off to her
grandparents, and she vomits down the back of my Hawaiian shirt
(which, in retrospect, could well have been an editorial comment),
and it is 27 years before I willingly touch her again, but that is
another story.
There is one other thing that happens in 1962. We are living
at the corner of North Shore and Greenview in the Rogers Park area

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of Chicago, and right across street of us is this old apartment
building, and on the third Saturday of every month strange-looking