TransAtlantic Fan Fund Free Ebooks

Slow Pint Glass

Bob Shaw

ISBN 978-1-913451-71-4

Slow Pint Glass is a huge collection of Bob Shaw’s other fan and fan-adjacent writing not already included in The Enchanted Duplicator (1954 with Walt Willis; much reprinted; TAFF ebook May 2015), The Serious Scientific Talks (TAFF ebook November 2019) and The Full Glass Bushel (TAFF ebook June 2020).

Cover art by Jim Barker, a July 2020 reworking of his memorial piece for Bob Shaw first published in Tyne Capsule (March 2015; TAFF ebook September 2019).

The collection, compiled by Rob Jackson and David Langford, contains 171,000 words of fine fanwriting – more than The Serious Scientific Talks and The Full Glass Bushel put together – ranging from the early 1950s to the 1990s. First published as an Ansible Editions ebook for the TAFF site on 30 August 2020; expanded more than once as additional material came to light, most recently in November 2022. Contents list here.

From the Introduction by David Langford

Most of the humorists for which Bob shows admiration in the articles that follow – Patrick Campbell, Stephen Leacock, S.J. Perelman, James Thurber, Mark Twain – cultivated an air of bemusement at the vagaries of the weird world we live in. This was an attitude that Bob himself could always carry off brilliantly. What other writer, struggling with deadlines, would find himself fatally distracted by a noisy invasion of hot air balloons? Or be a fascinated eye-witness on the utterly memorable night when Brian Aldiss broke the bed? Or, in a perfectly ordinary visit to the loo at an SF convention, become entangled in the embarrassing toils of the Penis Fly Trap? See “The Writer’s Year”, “Once Upon a Tyne” and “Wetfoot in the Head” respectively.