9 - Proof

Spring 2007

PRINT EDITION: Sold out

Original blurb

Sniff out Proof, the first issue of Fuselit to contain a colour supplement (artwork by Cliff Hammett) and a free mini-CD (tracks by Chilon, Ragland and Damn Yer Eyes). We've used marbled card for the cover, and hand-finished it with touches of green and orange. Inside there's more artwork, plus short stories and poetry.

A major leap in design. Jon built a new website and we got to thinking about how Fuselit would evolve without the trestle table on campus to sell it from. Like Dorothy, we found ourselves in glorious technicolour, printing the text-only pages ourselves and including full-colour pictures with the help of the local print shop in Maida Vale, where our new flat was based. This enabled us to do full credit to beautiful illustrations, and to consider future options for the magazine. We went for a mottled wine-red card cover showing a bottle of perfume bearing the title, elegantly coloured in with, er, gel pens. We also included a mini CD for the first time with Proof, stencilled with a knife design and splattered with red paint. Belle and Sebastian-esque black and white illustrations by the multi-talented Bek Galloway appeared and we bid a warm welcome to frequent Fuselit flier Rab Green with this issue.

We bought a huge guillotine (one with a blade you pull down) to try to cut the pages for this but ended up sitting in a pile of broken, tatty-edged Fuselits with paper shrapnel all about us. Thus began, until the advent of stab-binding, our ritual of printing out and binding a stack of 20 copies, then running them over to a print shop just for the use of their trimming machine. Proof was definitely a 'learning process' issue. We spent far too much on the colour printing, used a card that was too thick on the covers, and hadn't yet learned that you could buy and print your own CD labels. The construction didn't do justice to the contents, and I hope we'll have time to rescue some of these pieces from the vault in the near future.