Advent: Publishers
Entry updated 18 March 2024. Tagged: Publisher.
Chicago-based specialist publishing house, founded in 1956 by Earl Kemp and other sf fan members of the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club. The focus of Advent:Publishers was on critical and bibliographical material, together with works relating to Fandom. Its first book was Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder (coll 1956; exp 1967; exp 1996). Other notable critical volumes are James Blish's two collections of incisive essays The Issue at Hand (coll 1964) and More Issues at Hand (coll 1970), both as by William Atheling Jr; and, later, his posthumous The Tale that Wags the God (coll 1987), as by Blish. Advent:Publishers' most important scholarly publication has been Donald H Tuck's The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968 (volume 1 1974; volume 2 1978; volume 3 1982).
Further titles of interest include the critical anthology The Science Fiction Novel: Imaginative and Social Criticism (anth 1959), anonymously edited by Earl Kemp with contributions from Alfred Bester, Robert Bloch, Basil Davenport, Robert A Heinlein and C M Kornbluth; The Eighth Stage of Fandom (coll 1962) by Robert Bloch, a mostly humorous selection from the author's Fanzine writings; The Universes of E.E. Smith (1966) by Ron Ellik and Bill Evans, an enthusiastically fannish concordance to the sf of E E Smith; Harry Warner Jr's All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the Forties (1969; exp 2004 NESFA Press); the highly informal symposium of sf professionals' correspondence and controversy, PITFCS – Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies (1992), edited by Theodore R Cogswell (whom see for details); and The Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards (1998) by Howard DeVore, listing winners (and where applicable, ballot finalists) of the Hugos, Nebulas and World Fantasy Awards.
Advent:Publishers was acquired by Andrew Burt's POD/ebook imprint ReAnimus Books in 2014; several of the classic critical works by Atheling/Blish, Knight et al have been reissued in ebook form. [MJE/DRL]
see also: Small Presses and Limited Editions.
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