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C R I T I C A L V I S I O N
Savoy's launch in 1976 merged the earlier independent publishing ventures of David Britton and Michael Butterworth. Appearing slowly over a period of almost a decade between 1968 and 1977 and drawing inspiration directly from two magazines—Michael Moorcock's New Worlds and E Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales—came a total of fourteen offset litho amateur and semi-professional publications. Mostly, they looked the part, produced on a heady mixture of enthusiasm, eclecticism and very little cash. The best of their contents eventually found their way into Savoy's two anthologies, The Savoy Book (1977) and Savoy Dreams (1984), and the Moorcock juvenile collection Sojan (1977). We've mined them again thirty years later for our illustrated
edition of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (forthcoming)!
Our exodus from our old field was seen as a sell out by some,
as evidenced by jibes like the one in Martin Sudden's strip, published after the appearance of Wordworks 6 (due to our collaboration this 'zine had become shinier, slicker
and fatter than its predecessors).
We surfed on the 1960s' wave of the Underground and small press, enabled by the new offset lithographic printing technology which for the first time brought professional printing virtually into the bedroom. Before that, small press publications had to be copied from a stencil master on duplicating machines like the Roneo—and these publications, which were the launch platform for Savoy, ergo Savoy itself, probably wouldn't have happened without these printing developments. |
