The Postlethwaite Collection
Some months ago, I helped a friend move. Kevin bought the new house from the children of the previous owner, who passed away. Our first job was to clear out some things they left behind.
There was a big cardboard box in the attic. It was full of old comic books and magazines. The magazines were National Geographic and Elle, the comics DC. Kevin knows something about comic books, so we left the box. He would sort through it later.
Recently, he invited me over. He said he found some things at the bottom of the box that I might know what to do with. He showed me a stack of pages folded in half. The paper was yellowed. The typewritten text was photocopied. Tiny holes and tears on the open edges suggested they were stapled together. A hand-drawn banner across the top read “L’avant guard” next to a figure with rifle in uniform complete with epaulets and bicorne headdress.
I said, “Wow! These are a wargaming group’s old newsletters.”
He said, “Yeah, do you want them?”
L’avant garde was the “Newsletter of the East Middleton Wargamers Association.” The association’s address shows Middleton, Kansas. The recipient’s address box names the subscriber as Andrew J. Postlethwaite of Batesville, AR. Kevin’s new house is not in Arkansas, and he tells me the previous owners were named Thompson.
I said, “Wow! These are a wargaming group’s old newsletters.”
He said, “Yeah, do you want them?”
What I call the Postlethwaite collection counts 43 issues of L’avant garde plus a half dozen numbers of Paradigm Lost, an excerpt from whose first issue I cite in “The Pandemonium Society.”
L’avant garde usually runs between 20 and 30 pages. The front page displays the banner at top and contains a letter from the editor and sometimes a contents table. The back page reproduces the banner on the top half and shows the sender and recipient addresses on the bottom half. Folded and stapled, it makes a mailable package.
Each issue is numbered, most are dated by the month and year. A few numbers are missing—I presume lost or the subscription lapsed. One number is repeated in a later issue.
The newsletter was published at irregular intervals, the longest between October 1970 and March 1972. The earliest I have is issue #3, dated July 1967. The latest is #78, [no month] 1986.
The contents are standard wargame fare: battle reports; game rules; reviews of games, game books, game magazines, and miniature figurines; gamer classifieds: game dates, players seeking games, used games for sale or trade; and ads for games sponsored by the Game Hoard, a local shop.
Early issues are all wargames, mostly Napoleon-era. The first reference to fantasy comes in 1969, and in March 1974 the first mention of D&D appears. In the next year or so, D&D articles are sparse, but “fantasy wargaming” takes up more and more space as issues go by. A 1978 letter from the editor states the goal to maintain “a 50/50 balance between fantasy adventure and historical wargaming.”
Paradigm Lost apes L’avant garde’s layout. Its page count varies wildly from six to 44 pages. Its contents, notably more juvenile, are strictly D&D.
Phenster’s Pandemonium Society House Rules is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, incidents, and newsletters are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is pure coincidence.