Although I’ve been more active on social media the last few weeks, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here.
Diving in: Hudson Luce served as the unfortunate intermediary between Gunderloy and R. Seth Friedman. Unfortunate not because of anything he did, but rather what happened to him. Luce details the tragic circumstances of the publication of the issue and its aftermath on Wikipedia’s F5 Talk page, which is worth a read.
Cover of Issue 45
Section from Luce’s Editorial Comment about Gunderloy’s annoucement.
As Luce notes in the “Editorial Comment,” he had moved to Atlanta from Cincinnati just before Gunderloy posted his intentions to quit F5 via the Internet community the WELL (likely as Issue 44 was at the printer) to focus on the The World of Zines (his book with co-editor Cari Goldberg Janice) and a column for Whole Earth Review, edited then by Howard Rheingold. Side note: correspondence in the archive from this time imply that Gunderloy was going to take over for Rheingold as editor of WER.
There’s more to say about this transition and how it affected the politics of F5, especially the division highlighted by Stephen Duncombe in Notes from Underground; however, let’s get back to Luce and the aftermath of Issue 45. As he* tells it, ten days after the issue was mailed out from Atlanta, his aunt died, requiring him to move to yet again to Kansas City to serve as executor of her estate. Later that summer he shattered his shoulder after going into a ditch on his bike trying to avoid a car accident. As he laments:
“If I’d been physically able to continue, I wanted to produce the magazine wholly on the internet, and would have done so, especially in light of the development of the World Wide Web… but things worked out the way they did. Chris and Paris Rice of Kansas City helped out doing music reviews and Tim Kearns did reviews of all sorts of zines for what would have been Issue 46. After I was injured, they did the physical labor I was unable to do, in shipping out what must have been about 1600 lbs of zines to San Francisco (40 boxes of zines at about 40 lbs/box)”
*I have not verified whether or user “Stream47” (who is no longer on Wikipedia) is indeed Luce, but it makes sense.