About Visco

The Aims of Visco

You may think that the objective of the Visco project just a tiny bit ambitious.
Its ultimate aim is no less than to collect and make available over the Internet a cover image of every science fiction, fantasy, weird and horror magazine ever published in the English language.

You can see right away that I am sticking my neck out a little here – not least in even attempting a definition of what is or is not SF, what’s a magazine, what does “published” mean, &c. You can see below my thoughts on what should be in the scope of this but suffice it to say that I am not an academic and I am not interested in fine distinctions. I am interested in creating a wonderful visual resource for SF fans and researchers that will be an astonishment and delight to all who see it.

Visco in its present state is a long way away from this ambition. Nevertheless, it already contains some content which, as far as I know, is not available in this form anywhere else on the Net. To reach the final goal, I will need your help and a little further down this page I suggest how you can do that.

What's In, What's Out

The question of what should be in the Visco database and what should be left out is one of the toughest and most contentious I have had to tackle. As I said, I am not an academic and I don't want to invest time and energy in arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What I have done is rely on existing expertise - you can see here the main sources I have used - and make my own mind up where it's a question of taste. I have tended include things rather than not when they are on the boundaries.

Basically, my definition of the magazines to be included in Visco covers:

magazines intended for (even if they did not necessarily achieve) serial publication and news-stand distribution. A few may sneak in where it's a fine argument as to whether they were magazines or series of anthologies or story collections

professional mags, not fanzines. There are too many of those, too hard to track down and many of them are graphically not that interesting, but a few might get included for historical, artistic or sentimental reasons. I will include a number of widely respected and well-produced "semi-prozines", though

print magazines only. I'm not interested in comic books and ezines are too ephemeral

all mainstream science fiction and fantasy, also weird in most of its manifestations but getting a bit grey around horror, weird mystery and menace; I will probably include most of the borderline cases

specialist genre magazines, not those that print the odd SF story

mags devoted mainly to fiction, not those majoring on factual articles, criticism and reviews or "true" stories

mags rooted in the original written word, not film, gaming and TV spin-offs, hence forget Star Trek, Dr Who, SFX, &c

The last is the hardest to justify but - well, they just don't interest me and, to me, they are not real SF.

If you want a better idea of exactly what my home-made and self-imposed rules embrace, look at the alphabetic magazine index. It shows 330 distinct titles comprising more than 9,000 issues. If you think there are any glaring inconsistencies or omissions, contact me.

Finally, I plan to include

front cover images, regardless of whether they are original artwork, photos or plain text (e.g. 1940s Unknowns, some British reprints of the 60s)

images of the back cover when they contain interesting artwork (not when they are adverts, preview of next month’s magazine, etc

But not interior artwork

Copyright, &c

I am very sensitive of the ownership of the images reproduced here and well aware of how often and how casually copyright is abused on the Net. When I first began to plan Visco, I had no wish to commit any abuses of my own and I resolved that I would not publish any image for which I had not got explicit permission from the copyright owner. I now realise what an impractical and idealistic notion that was. Many of the artists are long since dead and many of the publishers have long since gone out of business. It would be impossible to trace the ownership of every image, at least with the resources I have. So my policy now is this:

Whenever I can easily identify who the copyright owner should be, and they are still around to be contacted, I will ask permission. This would be the case, for example, with the covers of magazines still in current publication

When I can identify the artist (which I can in about 60% of cases so far), I will credit him or her by name

I will limit the size of the images to avoid accidentally giving away the opportunity for commercial exploitation of something that doesn't belong to me. In practice, this means a maximum height of 500 pixels. This should be good enough for you to enjoy the artwork and identify magazines you don't recognise. However, you will not be going into business printing posters or T-shirts with what you find here.

If I have attributed the ownership or origin of any image wrongly, please contact me. However, I shall not be too sympathetic to complaints of "Hey, that's an image of my copy of the magazine!" The copyright belongs, as I understand it, to the artist or the publisher, depending on what kind of contract they signed, their heirs and successors. Having a copy of the magazine doesn't get you any special privileges. I will, of course, ask permission before borrowing images directly from other people's web sites, even though it is clear to me that many of these have been borrowed from somewhere else in the first place.

How You Can Help

The most important way in which you can help is in finding good quality images for the database. I believe that my definition embraces something over 9,000 magazine issues and I have images or actual physical copies of about 8,000 of them. But a proportion of these are small or of poor quality, not good enough for inclusion here. So I need you to contribute images if you can.

I particularly need images of:

Relatively recent magazines from the 80s on – most should be fairly readily available, I just don’t have them all. I need, for instance, Realms of Fantasy, SF Age, Aberrations, Absolute Magnitude. I largely have Asimov's and Analog covered now and hope to include them soon

But not only these – as I have said, I could do with better quality images of many I already have. There is now a "wants list" that lists titles and issues that I need in the immediate future.

So - want to help? Got images of your own, or a scanner and magazines you could scan? Go to the contacts section to find out how to reach me. Your help will, of course, be acknowledged here.

If you know anyone else who would be interested, pass on a link to Visco. If you have a web site of your own which interested people might visit, please add a link to Visco. The more people know about it, the faster it will grow.

Status and Update History

This is version 2.11 of the database, issued 1st November 2005

Version	Release date	Editions indexed	Editions included	Issues indexed	Images included	Notes
2.11	1-11-2005	331	100	9265	3539+92	UNK-UNK1-UNK2-UNKF-UNKF1 added
2.10	5-04-2005	330	95	9265	3458+92	ASF added
2.09A	3-03-2005	Unchanged				FSF text corrected and leading artist table revised
2.09	25-02-2005	330	94	9265	2566+92	BWT, CSS, DMM1, DMM2, FAYA, FAYB, HOR1, FST, PHA,SAS, SCO, SIN1, SMM1, STLB, STV, TER1, THS, WOU, WSI, WSM1, WSM2, YAN added; SWA moved; ASF1, FSF, INZ, NW2, SSS3, VEN1, WTK3 updated; charity appeal added
2.08	25-10-2004	325	72	9230	2459+92	AMZ4, ASS, PLN1, PLN2, SFQ1, SFQ2, STS1, STS2, WON1, WON2, WON3, WTC1, WTC2, WTK1 ,WTK2, WTK3 added
2.07	2-10-2004	324	56	9155	2335+92	DYN1 ,FAD1, FAD2, FAN1, FNV1, FNV2, MSS1, SFN1, SSS1, SSS2, SSS3, SWA added Structure of artist attribution index changed
2.06	18-09-2004	324	44	9155	2260+92	SFMB added
2.05	20-03-2004	324	43	9155	2232+90	ASF British Edition added. FSF updated. Minor maintenance changes
2.04B	1-08-2003	Unchanged				Reissued on new hosting service
2.04A	6-06-2003	Unchanged				Reissued to correct artist index
2.04	4-06-2003	324	42	9155	2006+90	GXY and WIF British editions added
2.03	22-04-2003	324	33	9155	1802+88	FSF complete. FSF3, IMG, IMT, AUT added
2.02	14-03-2003	324	29	9155	1308+79	First full release of version 2 - all 1.12 content restored plus further FSF to 1976
2.01	28-02-2003	324	6	9155	268+3	Moved to new site with extensive internal changes - trial version
1.12	31-01-2003	324	29	9155	1176+63	INZ complete. FSF to 1966
1.11	16-01-2003	324	29	9155	1040+46	AMZ1, AMZ2, AMZ3 added. More FSF and INZ
1.10	7-01-2003	324	26	9155	857+39	FSF, INZ added (first batch)
1.9	18-12-2002	324	24	9149	766+32	OUT, SNS added. Updates to FSS, FUT1, TOT, WOFA, WSP
1.8	13-12-2002	324	22	9149	643+32	FSF2, FSS, TOT, VEN1, WOFA, WSP added
1.7	6-12-2002	324	16	9149	533+32	AME and FSF1 added. Wants page added. Some updates to NEB1, NW and VST
1.6	9-11-2002	324	14	9149	480 + 32 backs	COV and NEB completed. FUT1, FUT2,SFN2, SFS1, TOW added.
1.5	3-11-2002	324	9	9149	421 + 30 back covers	NEB and NEB1 added
1.4	27-10-2002	324	7	9149	378	COV, NW1, NW2, VST added. NW, SFA and SFY updated. Minor corrections to the main index.
1.3	21-10-2002	332	3	9149	342	New Worlds complete but for five issues
1.2	15-10-2002	332	3	9149	203	First batch of New Worlds. Image sizes increased to 500 px
1.1	9-10-2002	332	2	9149	125	No new content - minor corrections to headings, text sizes and scrolling
1.0	2-10-2002	332	2	9149	125	First release - partial coverage of Nova titles. No publisher or artist data.

Future Plans

I have now fixed the design problem that made it difficult and time-consuming to add new artist data and I have now put on most of the British titles that I was aimimg for. I next plan to sweep up all the remining British titles I know of and start adding the major US titles. I also want to add some more recent magazines from the 90s on, which are not generally well served elsewhere on the Net. Go here to see the wants list if you think there are any titles you can help with, but don't feel constrained by it. If there are titles you would like to see sooner rather than later, please contact me.

Contacts

You can reach me at the following email address. It is given here as an image rather than a mailto link as I am told that web crawlers can find embedded email addresses and I get enough junk mail already. I don't know if this works, but it's worth a try.

For similar reasons, I am not too keen on leaving my postal address on the Internet, either. If you need to contact me by post, please email me first and I will let you have the address by return.

Mailing list

At least until it becomes too large to be manageable, I will be keeping an (e)mailing list of people who have expressed an interest in Visco and want to be kept informed of developments. I will send out an announcement of each new release of the database and maybe other newsletters about future plans, mysteries to be solved, areas of research interest, pleas for help, etc. All you have to do to join the list is send me an email with "Add to Visco list" in the subject line. You can choose to be chatty if you want, but that's the minimum. If you no longer want the emails, send one with "Remove from Visco list" in the subject line. People who send images or want to engage in correspondence about Visco I will presume are interested, and I will add them unless they say not.

Submitting images

You can
- email them to the above address
- post them on a web site and tell me where to find them
- send them on PC-compatible floppy disk, 100 MB Zip disk or on CD/DVD in any Windows 95/98/XP compatible format to a postal address that I will send you by email.

File Requirements

My preferred format is JPG as it is much the most efficient for high quality, full-colour images. The image should be a decent size -–at least 500 pixels high, preferably 700 or more. Although they will be reduced in size for display on this site, this gives me scope for any corrections that may need to be made. Besides, I am maintaining a database of larger images for research purposes, of which only the reduced versions will be publicly available.

Ideally, they should be made on a flatbed scanner, which usually gives much better results than a digital camera. Use a JPG compression factor of about 20 and avoid cropping the magazine's edges, even if they are ragged. If you are doing the scanning yourself, name the files as follows:

Publication title_date or number_artist name if known.file extension
For example: AMZ_192705.JPG
Amazing_Qly_1930_Summer_Morey.JPG

You can spell out the title (don't use space, hyphens or other special characters, but the underscore character_ is OK), or use a sensible abbreviation, or best of all, use the code from my alphabetical index. For dates, use one of the following formats:

yyyymm - e.g., 193605 for May 1936, or
yyyy_season - e.g., 1945_Winter, or
yyyymmdd - e.g., 19400215 for February 15th, 1940.

If you are sending images you have already got, I will take them as they are with the proviso that the files should be named or indexed somehow so as to identify clearly the title and the publication date - also the artist, if you know who it is.