Fantast (Medway)
Fantast (Medway) was a British SF mail-order bookselling business run by Ken Slater along with Tony Thorne. It grew out of his earlier Operation Fantast.
It was named "Fantast (Medway)" in spite of not being near the Medway (a river in Kent) because Thorne had already had a shop in the Medway area, and they needed to distinguish the business from an existing "Fantast".
It's unclear when they began to use the name although catalogues were certainly issued from January 1955 and possibly slightly earlier. A catalogue issued in September 1955 was numbered "8" and one in October "9" so there's a good chance that the January 1955 catalogue, the existence of which is implied by the unnumbered February catalogue, was the first. These catalogues are inevitably mostly given over to lists of books and magazines but also included a degree of sf publishing and fan news.
- Sample Fantast Medway catalogues online at fanac.org
| Store | 1955—???? |
| This is an SF bookstore page. When a floreat "fl." is listed it records the dates for which we have evidence and may not be the store's entire span. |
