User:Jayembee

OK, time to give the skinny...

I'm Jerry Boyajian. Been reading SF as far back as I could read. Aside from the Tom Swift Jr and Tom Corbett series books, my first "real" SF book was Heinlein's Space Cadet (borrowed from the library because of the title similarity to the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet books :-)), and the first one I owned was the Groff Conklin anthology The Best of Science Fiction, given to me by an uncle. My first encounter with fandom was Boskone 6 (1969), and I joined NESFA a year later. By that point, I'd already started collecting with a vengeance.

My interest in bibliography started when I was a wee little lad, compiling lists of...well, things that interested me: lists of Civil War generals, lists of fictitious chemical elements, lists of comic book superheroes. I even tried compiling episode guides of SF TV shows before such things became fashionable. Let me tell you, it wasn't easy trying to write down the information as it flashed by on the screen. In NESFA, I got involved with their SF magazine indexes. After I'd left NESFA, and they dropped the ball on their indexes for a few years (no cause and effect implied), a friend, Ken Johnson, and I started our own SF magazine indexes.

A bought of ennui caused me to largely gafiate from SF and SF fandom in the late 1980s. Through the 90s, I tended to read mainstream fiction, and more recently, I've been getting more into crime fiction and westerns. But the SF bug is still there, if not as virulent as it once was, and a recently-started attempt to [re-]catalog my collection - supported by forays into the ISFDb - prompted my joining here.