Minicon 15

Minicon 15 was held 13–15 April 1979 at the Minneapolis Radisson. The guests of honor were Theodore Sturgeon (pro), Tom Digby (fan), and Rick Sternbach (artist). Robert E. Vardeman was an honored guest. The executive committee was Carol Anndy, Don Bailey, Bev Elmshauser, Scott Imes, and Dave Wixon.

The Number

Minicon 15 followed directly after Minicon 13. This is because "Minicon 14" was originally held to be the name for the fallcon in 1978. Much confusion ensued when the fallcon ended up not being called that. Some early records (like concom minutes) refer to the Minicon in 1979 as "Minicon 14", either because the writer didn't know the fallcon was going to take "14" in the first place, or because they assumed that the springcon would revert to "14" after the fallcon gave it up. See further notes on the pages for Minicon 14, Minicon 19, Anokon 1, etc.

Membership

There were 830 pre-registrations and 189 at-the-door, for a total of 1019. So say Minicon 16 concom minutes from March 16, 1980.

There's plenty of confirmation from less clear information we found before we found those minutes: 'A little over 1000' says the Bozo Bus Tribune, which continues 'as of 4pm Saturday'. Over 1000 for the first time, says Dave Romm. I found a sticky note in the box of reg cards that says

78 pink
92 one day
916
1008
Minicon 15

Some of the reg cards are pink. Maybe they are the full at-the-door? Anyway, it's not clear this is the final number. Perhaps it is the calculation that went into the Bozo Bus issue. There are also at least a handful of Sunday membership cards, although most of the one-day cards don't say what day they are for, so it must be at least a little over a little over 1000. 1015 at minimum, which matches the 1019 well.

Program Book

Here's a PDF of the whole thing (15 MB), and a text-only transcription (33 kB).

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Scans are available here in a range of qualities and file sizes. Most people want the middle column, in which the files have been substantially cleaned up to remove the grain of the paper, bleed through from adjacent pages, etc., but are still high resolution.

Raw scans (~15 MB)	Cleaned up (~500 kB)	Smallest files (~30 kB)
Front cover	Front cover	Front cover
2–3	2–3	2–3
4–5	4–5	4–5
6–7	6–7	6–7
8–9	8–9	8–9
12–11	12–11	12–11
10–13	10–13	10–13
14–15	14–15	14–15
16–17	16–17	16–17
18–19	18–19	18–19
20–21	20–21	20–21
22–23	22–23	22–23
24–25	24–25	24–25
26–27	26–27	26–27
28–29	28–29	28–29
30–31	30–31	30–31
32–33	32–33	32–33
34–35	34–35	34–35
36–37	36–37	36–37
38–39	38–39	38–39
Back cover	Back cover	Back cover

Except as noted below, the parts of the Minicon 15 Program Book made available here are by the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, David Stever, or Lee Pelton and are are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Content by Jim Young is © Jim Young and reproduced here by permission. Content by Kathy Marschall is © Kathy Marschall and reproduced here by permission. Content by Alexis Gilliland is © Alexis Gilliland and reproduced here by permission. Art by Jim Odbert is © nybor mystical art 2009 and reproduced here by permission. Advertisements remain property of the advertisers.

This notice overrides copyright notices in the original document, if any.

T-shirt

Front and back, respectively:

Small image of the back of the Minicon 15 t-shirt

Badge

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