Saturday 8 October 2011

Vampire journal purchases

While researching my my post on vampire journals, I sought out pricing for some available on the 'net. I found a couple of 'em on eBay and snapped 'em both up for US$9 each on September 28, after getting the seller to knock 'em down from 12 bucks a pop. They arrived in the post, yesterday.

They were both issues of Vampire Information Exchange's Vampire Information Exchange Newsletter; issues 75 (July 1996) and 77 (February 1997), respectively. I'm not sure if the newsletter's still published, but I do know it started in 1979.

That duration's an impressive feat, in itself, for a vampire periodical. In contrast, Martin V. Riccardo's Journal of Vampirism—official publication of his Vampire Studies Society—folded after two years (1977–79).

The issue numbers, however, are pretty daunting from a collecting perspective. Not only is the newsletter comparatively rare, but I only have a few others. The idea of collecting all of them, is a bit of a nightmare. 

Issue 75 (above) focuses on 'Female vampires in literature'. The primary articles in this category are Louise Ann Stephens' 'Madeline Montalia matures' (pp. 16–17), Karen Porter's 'Ancient sources for the literary female vampire' (pp. 17–18) and Feleccia Rea's 'The nature of the beast: the female vampire' (pp. 18–24).

Issue 77 (left) tackled psychic vampirism, and to that extent, there was a brief 'Glossary of terms' (p. 13), a discussion of 'The Old Hag theory' (pp. 14–15), presumably by Eric Held,  and two familiar 'faces' returned. Karen S. Porter wrote about 'Psychic aspects in traditional vampirism' (pp. 16–17), while Louise Ann Stephens took 'A not-so-brief look at psychic vampirism' (pp. 17–22). 

I'm not aware of any vampire books written by Porter and Stephens, so I hopped on Google to track 'em down. I couldn't find anything solid on Stephens, but I did find out that Porter's a poet. At the time (1997), she was 'engaged in the unromantic job of helping to run her family's liquor store.'

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