Friday, September 14, 2012

FAN #251: "The Armenian Quarter" by Jonathan Edelstein

Up today at the Sobel Wiki are two more For All Nails vignettes.  First is #251: "The Armenian Quarter" by Jonathan Edelstein, about an Armenian baxter in Alexandria, Egypt in September 1976.  Next is #260A: "East or West: Minsk at the Crossroads" by Randy McDonald, the latest (and so far, last) dispatch from Quebecois journalist Andre-Philippe Maeterlinck, from February 1975.

Those of you who are following the For All Nails saga closely (assuming anyone is) may be wondering why #260, a vignette featuring Joan Kahn in 1978, is followed by #260A, a vignette featuring Maeterlinck in 1975.  The answer is that when I was assembling the For All Nails page at the Sobel Wiki, my only guide to the vignettes after #250 was the soc.history.what-if archive at Google Groups.  I would do a search for "all nails 263" and up would pop vignette #263: "Lost in Space" by Dave MB, and I would add that to the list of vignettes.  However, when I did a search for "all nails 260" nothing came up.  I figured the Google Groups archive must have lost #260, or else it had never been posted, so I stuck in a replacement: my own vignette "Be My Guest" which I wrote in 2004 but never got around to posting.  However, Dave MB either has superior Google-fu, or else he remembered what I had forgotten: that the reason there was no #260 was because Randy McDonald had begun a second series of Maeterlinck vignettes with #260A.  As it happens, Randy never got around to writing any more, so #260A is all there is.  For now, anyway.  (Hint hint, Randy).

"The Armenian Quarter" was posted to shw-i on 22 May 2003, and "East or West? Minsk at the Crossroads" on 5 August 2003.

2 comments:

DaveMB said...

I stumbled upon 260A in a Google search of the shwi group for just "for all nails", wondering if maybe the two missing pieces of Carlos were there in some strange way. I saw 260A and recognized that it was not on the Wiki's list or the chronology.

But it's the post that canonized "Huronia" as the name of roughly OTL Ontario, used by Andrew later.

Johnny Pez said...

Carlos never finished "Brothers", and I don't know whether he ever wrote "I, Mercator 4".