Interzone is the leading British science fiction magazine and has been for over 30 years. It was founded in 1982 and editor David Pringle remained at the helm for 193 issues, until he stepped down in 2004. Since then, it has been part of the TTA Press stable, with the capable Andy Cox as editor; their latest issue — Interzone 252, May–June 2014 — arrived earlier this month. In fact,the only thing not marvelous about Interzone is that it’s so hard to come by here in the US. Barnes & Noble imports issues every two months (although at the prohibitively high price tag of $11.95), but back issues are almost impossible to find. Even eBay isn’t much help.

Enter 2013 Windy City Pulp & Paper last month. I made some terrific purchases at the show, and I’ll be telling you about them over the next few weeks. But hands down, my best find of the weekend was a vast collection of fanzines and assorted 70s and 80s fantasy magazines in a $1 bin at the Adventure House booth — including 64 issues of Interzone, most of them unread. I ended up buying all of them… by far the largest collection of Interzone I’ve ever purchased. I bought about 30 recent issues from a UK seller a few years ago, but these were much older, and much less expensive: a beautiful assortment of issues between 75 and 191, with original fiction from Michael Bishop, Paul Di Filippo, Michael Moorcock, Tony Ballantyne, Paul Park, Thomas M. Disch, Eric Brown, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Geoff Ryman, Tanith Lee, Ian Watson, Richard Calder, and many, many others.

This one find made the entire show worthwhile and I’ll be spending the next few weeks happily digesting these treasures — including Nick Lowe’s delightful Mutant Popcorn film column, David Langford SF gossip column Ansible Link, and other non-fiction features and artwork. If you’re looking for a break from American short fiction, I highly recommend Interzone as the gold standard of European SF and fantasy. Their website it here — check them out.

So far I’ve covered the following treasures found at Windy City this year:

Super Science Fiction pulps
The Vril Agenda by Derrick Ferguson and Josh Reynolds
Science Fiction of the 30′s edited by Damon Knight
Fantastic Novels, July 1948
Two Decades of Interzone
The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII edited by Karl Edward Wagner
Weird Tales #290
Stephen E. Fabian’s Ladies & Legends
The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Aidan Chambers
Subterranean Magazine #2

We last covered Interzone with David Soyka’s review of issue #243. See all our Interzone coverage here.

Read all of our recent Vintage Treasure articles here.