A review by bookcrazylady45
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins

5.0

I loved coming across a line about 'on the wall of my office hangs a print by fan artist Jean Kluge' only to realize that on my bedroom wall hangs a print by fan artist Jean Kluge'. I love connections to things I read. As a fan fiction reader, I found fandom in 1995 and became a beta reader for a very prolific writer plus a few others over time. I collected stories, I traded tapes, I went to cons, I joined egroups and I exchanged emails with hordes of women. Texual Poachers was the very first book I ever read about fandom that took it seriously and covered a lot of the ground I had explored myself. It was written in 1992 before the internet as it became for me even existed. My first fandom was totally online and never did get into zine production. The next two fandoms were among the oldest and had a huge paper circuit library and zines from as far back as 1978. As the book noted, as a fan who followed the characters, I found myself following the actor's careers which took me out of my comfort zone of interest into strange avenues of movies and television shows that I would never have seen otherwise and into the books from which some of those movies were adapted and then books about fandom itself. As I reread this one, I am underlining even more..using a different colour pen this time to distinguish today from the last time I read the book.