This website was created by Kate Pollack, and I heartily thank her for it. Kate hosts a very interesting personal website called www.wilywhitefish.com. I do not know what (or who) wilywhitefish is, but that’s beside the point. You have to admire someone who hasn’t updated her website in months yet who takes this fact in stride. (However, I will soon be among those ranks, I’m sure.) And you really have to admire the person who won our office costume party last Halloween with something that knocked our socks off, a perfectly done Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, all of six or seven feet tall. There is a picture of Kate in this incarnation on her website. Go see. Kate, thank you again.

Michael F. Blake has been a makeup artist in Hollywood for more than twenty-five years and is the son of character actor Larry J. Blake. He is also a gifted writer and commentator on classic Hollywood and film history. Point of fact: it was Mike who established that Lon Chaney, the silent film star, was the engine behind the production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), rather than Irving Thalberg. His trilogy on Chaney includes Lon Chaney: The Man Behind the Thousand Faces (1990), A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney’s Unique Artistry in Motion Pictures (1995), and The Films of Lon Chaney (1998). He was a consultant on Kevin Brownlow’s documentary Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces (Turner Classic Movies, 2000). A few years ago, Mike graced us with the award-winning Code of Honor: The Making of Three Great American Westerns (2003). His most recent title has just come out: Hollywood and the O.K. Corral: Portrayals of the Gunfight and Wyatt Earp. It’s published by McFarland, so it’s a bit pricey, but, trust me, the material on Hour of the Gun (1967) and Tombstone (1993) alone is worth it. The sheer amount of scholarly research, hard work, plain facts, and insightful commentary Mike provides shames anyone else who claims to do film scholarship. This book is superior, even in comparison with Mike’s earlier work, and if you’ve read any of them, you know the high standards he sets for himself.

Keith Huff is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and is the award-winning author of many plays, including Mud People, A Steady Rain, The Bird and Mr. Banks, The Age of Cynicism, or Karaoke Night at the Hog, and Ebenezer: Return of the Scrooge. A Steady Rain, the story of two Chicago police officers, has been optioned for a movie adaptation. This play recently had a very well received run in New York, and Keith every opportunity to have his work seen by the largest number of people possible. He is that good. Visit his Chicago Dramatists website, and if you are at all interested in theater, see his work when you have the chance; he’s been produced off-Broadway and nationally, so keep an eye out locally.

Those of us of a certain age recall when we read the stories of Imaro in fanzines or, later, in the DAW paperbacks, and felt the same thrill we’d experienced as kids when we first discovered imaginative fiction. I know I did. Imaro—the Tamburure—Nyumbani—the Mashataan—everything that Charles R. Saunders wrote, worked. He is the real deal. There was absolutely no excuse for these stories to be forgotten in so short a space of time, but in the insane world in which we live, a corrupted world of turgid merchandise and damn-fool shallow postmodernism, that is what happened. The wonder for us is that, despite this culture that makes a mockery of anything worthwhile, Imaro is back. Imaro, the first of five volumes from Night Shade Books, came out in mid-2006. The second volume, The Quest for Cush, comes out in early 2007. If you are tired of what passes for adventure-fantasy today, the corporate crap, go back thirty years to when the real stuff was written with a bit of anger and a lot of care and abiding craftsmanship. You will be hooked.

Many of you will already be familiar with the career and works of Donald Sidney-Fryer, so I will not belabor the obvious here except to repeat my admiration for the man who is our poet laureate of the fantastique. His website is http://donaldsidneyfryer.free.fr, and if you do not yet have his second collection of Songs and Sonnets Atlantean, you should remedy that. Earlier I praised his adaptation (as it is called on the cover) of Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit. Most recently, Don has seen published his Songs and Sonnets Atlantean: The Third Series , and a world of wonder it is, too. If you are not familiar with this man’s verse and prose, really, take a moment to track down one of his books. Don produces material of a quality that anymore we associate with grand masters of the past. Great stuff.