Minicon 26
Minicon 26 was held 29–31 March 1991 at the Radisson Hotel South (Bloomington). Guests of honor were George Alec Effinger (author), David Cherry (artist), Al Kuhfeld, Ph.D. (science), Suzanne V. Tompkins and Jerry Kaufman (fans), and Jon Singer (lunch).
The total membership numbered 2299, with 2150 warm bodies. 170 were at the door, and 2080 pre-reg. 70 people were comped. 150 pre-registered members did not attend. No, those numbers don't quite add up, but that's what it says on this scrap of paper found in the archives!
The executive committee was Kay Drache, Karen Cooper, Karen Johnson, Lynn Litterer, and Polly Jo Peterson.
Program Book
Here is the program book in PDF (95 MB), or the same, but lower quality and a much smaller download (4 MB).
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The Minicon 26 Program Book was published with the statement, "Copyright © by Minnesota Science Fiction Society. [...] All rights reserved under various and sundry agreements and conventions. [...] No maps, illustrations, or other portions of this book may be reproduced in any form with guilt feelings (except where expressly copyrighted, which require permission of the artist/writer)." The earlier stuff notwithstanding, that last bit seems to be an attempt at a declaration of putting most of the book into the public domain. Let it be so. The expressly copyrighted things are covered here:
Components of the Minicon 26 Program Book by
Fred A Levy Haskell (photo),
Jeff Schalles (text), and
Stu Shiffman (art) are licensed under the
Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License.
Advertisements are copyrighted if so marked.
T-shirt
Here's a scan of the front of the t-shirt.
(And here's a rather high-res
version.)
It was available in at least two colors. Here's a photo of the back:
And here's a cool hand-colored one (not available for sale):
And here's art by Laramie Sasseville that was submitted for use on the t-shirt, but not used:
Mailer
Here's a mailer sent out (not called a progress report) (our scanning copy is water (coffee?) stained): as a PDF or individual page images: Outside, page of text, more text, forms.
Masquerade Video
Here is a video of the Minicon 26 Masquerade. (If you have trouble with the video format, try VLC.)
For somewhat higher video quality, you can also download all of the files needed to make yourself a copy of the DVD that the above file was extracted from.
The
Minicon 26 Masquerade Video, by the
Minnesota Science Fiction Society, is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Badges
Here is a sheet of badges (draft badges?).
And here's another one. Who knows if that's all of them.
And here's Dave Romm's badge
Here's a video including images of some of the button badges used in this Minicon era. These are mostly department or job badges, not general membership badges, although a Minicon 22 membership badge is in there.
Not-a-Website
The WWW had been invented by Minicon 26, but no web servers were live on the public Internet yet, so we're sure it didn't have a web site.
SEMGS
Here is a piece, mirrored from Gabe Helou, describing some public discussion after Minicon 25 (and hence related to planning Minicon 26).