Joe Gilbert

(November 21, 1920 – June 16, 1983)

Dr. Joseph Gatliff Gilbert was a Columbia, South Carolina, fan in the 1930s–40s. He was a member of FAPA and helped to organize the short-lived Dixie Fantasy Federation and was its secretary. With others, they published the fanzine The Southern Star, in the early 1940s. He was responsible for the Type Fifteen Fan.

He and Harry Jenkins, Jr., are credited with being the first to use the term actifan in print, in a review of Bonfire #1, appearing in Fantasite Vol. 1, No. 4 (July 1941, p. 20): "Official organ of the NFFF, which every actifan should join."

He was a charter member of The National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F) in 1941 and was on its first Advisory Board.

According to his obituary, he earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Tennessee in 1934 and worked in veterans’ hospitals.

• Founding Members article in the June, 2017 issue (Volume 76, Number 6) of The National Fantasy Fan.
• Photo (with fellow fan, Harry Jenkins) on page 172 of Harry Warner's history of fandom in the 1940s, All Our Yesterdays (Advent, 1969).
• Early short biography in Who's Who in Fandom 1940, page 7.
• Joe Gilbert's grave (Jewish Cemetery, Columbia SC).

Fanzines and Apazines:

• Sound Off! [early ’40s] (for FAPA)
• The Southern Star [early 40s] (with Art Sehnert and Harry Jenkins)
• Unfamous Fantastic Mysteries [1942]

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Person

1920—1983

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