Rambles Along the EDGE

Why EDGE Books?

It’s a question that I’m frequently asked.  To fully answer will require a journey back in time. A few of us can remember a time prior to the World Wide Web. That is where this story begins. Surprise! The Internet was around before the Web. Oh, it didn’t have as fancy a covering as it does today. Graphical interfaces were a novelty. They weren’t used for any serious computer work. But the basics were there. We had file transfer (FTP), remote login (FTP), and email. The Internet was a land occupied and ruled by geeks.

The world did not have the millions of miles of connecting fiber keeping everyone in touch. Many of us used the telephone lines. “Ma Bell” had created the infrastructure and crisscrossed the globe with wire already. Using modems and dial-up connections, we traveled far and wide at speeds which topped out at 19.2K. Yes, in the later years we pushed things up to 56K. But that was later. The Internet we know today was already well underway. During the time I’m referring to, we had progressed from 15 to 75 to 150bs. Baby steps which continued until we were zooming along at 1200bps. Things didn’t really take off however until we reached 2400bps. That made dial up usable for email and file transfer for far more people. From there we progressed through 4800, 9600, 14400, 19200, 28800, 33600 and finally, all the way to 56000bps. High Tech!

Dial up was the way to communicate. It opened up the world! If the person you were communicating with left their computer on and set their modem to receive you were able to exchange messages and pass files back and forth. Slowly. Once you got done, you could dial up someone else and do the same thing. Again, slowly. Still, it was a way to communicate.

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) evolved to make that slow communication a bit more efficient.  It didn’t speed up the time it took you to move files or email, but it did allow a wider range of input from more users. It could be used as a repository for files and for emails. Several BBS’s could communicate with one another, linking into networks which spanned a city, a region, a country or a world.

Here is where the story of EDGE Books really begins. I had been tinkering with computers for ten years. And yes, there were computers before the IBM PC. Most of them were sold for business use. If you wanted one at home, and lacked a bucketful of money, you built it. That’s what I had done. But this story isn’t about that. By the time the late 1980’s were upon us, the world’s largest amateur network was a huge lumbering creation called FidoNet. It was comprised of tens of thousands of privately owned BBS’s, each linked to one another by dial up.

Besides files and games, one of the largest attractions was email. FidoNet transferred email using an ingenious method. Email meant for an individual or group which wasn’t on the local BBS was bundled into groups called Echos.  When the local BBS dialed another BBS, it would exchange email packets. Users of the second BBS could read and reply to emails received from the first. In addition to connecting again to the first BBS, the second could also connect to a third or BBS, each time exchanging email bundles. In this manner, emails were bounced or echoed across the globe. Still pretty slow. If you were communicating with someone in a distant city, it might take several days for your email to reach them. For the reply, another several days was consumed by the process. Still, it cost the average user nothing more than the cost of a telephone call to their local BBS. All the costs were borne by the volunteers operating the BBS’s.

Ostensibly, each Echo had a subject. Those subjects ran the gamut from jokes to classified ads to support for a particular piece of software to recipes.  One of several that I read on a regular basis was a discussion of Science Fiction Literature. We had a regular group of readers (and responders). Sometimes our discussions were extremely serious. Other times, they were completely frivolous, despite the moderators vain attempts to keep us on topic and on track.

Around 1990, I was on active duty and traveling quite a bit for the US Navy. Carrying a computer and modem with me allowed me to keep up with my friends and my favorite subject. I began sending picture postcards to several people on the Science Fiction Literature Echo. I tried to select cards with a picture of something I had seen and included a comment about the location or a book I had read. As my circle of friends widened, I found myself mailing roughly 100 postcards on each trip. At one point, one of my friends in eastern Pennsylvania commented in the Echo that they had received my postcard. Another in Minneapolis replied that they had not received their card. A third, in Pittsburgh, stated that they had received their ‘postcard from the edge.’ The phrase caught my eye. It was catchy! I liked it! I began signing my postcards “From the Edge.”  I later discovered that the phrase was also the the title of a book and a movie. I watched the movie and decided that the characters were slightly off-center. The phrase fit. I kept it.

One of the things we discovered during our literature discussions was that the distribution of books was very regional in nature. A book which was difficult to find in the northeast was almost commonplace in the southwest. This was true even from publishers with national scope. Our only explanation was the use of regional or local buyers, even for national bookstore chains. I began buying books which were being discussed on the SF Echo and mailing them to other readers all over the world. I either charged my actual costs or received other books in trade. Other users began doing the same thing and a phenomenon was born. One reader in the Pittsburgh area put a name to it. The Fidonet Used Book Squad (FUBS) took on a life of it’s own. (Thanks, nGlen!)

Eventually, my retirement from the Navy loomed. All we knew for sure was that we were leaving California and going home to Louisiana. While discussing with my wife what our plans might be when I transitioned to the civilian world, she commented that I should do something with books since I like handling them. The idea formed that we should run a bookstore.  Plans were made. But, what to call it? I had all sorts of ideas. Most of them involved some foreign word which referred to various things I liked. A few invoked aliens or other science fiction related areas. But we were still in California at the time. We KNEW that people in the South were prejudiced. They would not patronize a store with a foreign name. That’s what we knew. Likewise, anything that might indicate that we specialized in something so strange as Science Fiction. Remember, at this time we were thinking the bookstore would be very general, carrying text books, romance novels, westerns, and the lot.

Who’s idea was it to use EDGE? I think it was probably mine, although it could have been my wife’s. At the time it seemed like a natural step from my postcards. When I retired from the Navy, I was presented with a beautiful, hand-carved plaque of the open book with ribbon and the word EDGE across it. It was just as I had described to her.  A month later, we took out a business license in Louisiana and EDGE Books was official.

We never did open the store. As an interim step we began selling at SF conventions. It became a way of life. Even though the Navy called several months after my retirement from active duty and I returned to a more mundane existence, I continued traveling to several SF conventions each month. In the intervening years since 1994, EDGE Books has become well known at literary SF conventions in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri. We have attended conventions from Miami to Seattle and Boston to San Diego.  EDGE Books has even made appearances at conventions in Hawaii and Australia.

Feist’s second law – Don’t assume the world evolved in the sequence you discover it.

Zane Melder EDGE Books Kentwood, LA