My Fandom: My first celebrity fan letter

This post will be the first in a series about my Fandom for many various topics that I was a fan of at some point in my life.  It will also cover how my fandom has changed over the years with one major catalyst that ended my collecting days for almost a decade.

I've written many fan letters in my life.  All of them coming in my adulthood and it's how my wrestling trading card collection has grown so large.  I write wrestlers asking them to sign trading cards of them for me and I include a stamped return envelope.  I have a 75% return success rate so it's worth it.

Before that I would write certain celebrities asking for a signed photo, I'll talk more about that in another post.

The first time I ever wrote a celebrity was way back in November of 1996 when I was a senior in high school.  I have always been a huge fan of Garfield the Cat comic strip and the Television specials.  I had recently found a book version of Garfield's Thanksgiving at a second hand store, I have a large collection of Garfield's comic strip books but hadn't realized that they made books of the TV specials.

As this in the pre-internet days you couldn't just go on Amazon or ebay and find anything you wanted.  So I went to my local bookstore Mr. Paperback, to see if I could order one.  Out of print, as was his Halloween special book.

For reasons I don't know I decided to write Jim Davis to ask him if he knew how I could get one, and express my love for the orange cat.  I mailed it to the publisher of his most recent book and then after a couple months I forgot about it.

One year later I got the response in the mail, as you can tell from the envelope it was quite obvious who it was from.  Now I realize that this was probably a form letter, but it was his real signature, not a pre-print, and it was in the same font as the cartoon is in.

I didn't know what a pre-print was at that time, however I later learned that a pre-print is when a celebrity signs a single photo and then the photo is copied with the signature on it to be mailed to fans who ask for a photo.  Not all celebrities do this but many of them do.

Now that I'm thinking of it I never did find a copy of Garfield's Christmas in book form...

Until Next Time!