Charles N. Brown, publisher and editor-in-chief of Locus Magazine passed away on July 12th, 2009. Locus is the major journal of SF news, and has been in publication since 1968, and is published from his home in the Oakland hills. His contributions to promoting and supporting the genre are numerous, dwarfed only by the likes of Forest J. Ackerman, who passed away late last year, and several other publishing legends in the SF field (Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell, to name a couple of them).
According to the announcement on the Locus website, it was his wish that Locus continue publication. This is a bit good news mixed with the bad.
As a personal note, when I still lived in California, I was fortunate to have a picture I took of Fritz Leiber and C. L. Moore published in the magazine. This was in ’92, shortly before Leiber passed away, and the photo was reprinted again in the Leiber tribute issue. The photo was one I took in 1980; it was a rare and very nice shot of these two SF legends together; Brown liked it and used it. This all came about because my girlfriend at the time was working for Locus and she showed the photo to him (actually, it was a slide, as I was using slide film at the time). I’ll try and dig it up.
Brown also knew how to throw a good party up at his home, and he had an extensive library that included, if memory serves me, Heinlein’s copies of his own books. Nothing like having a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land that belonged to the Man himself.
As Locus will continue to be published, I hope that Brown’s extensive library of rare and very special books will be maintained as part of the Locus library. It was quite impressive.
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