Minicon 27

Minicon 27 was held 17–19 April 1992 at the Radisson Hotel South (Bloomington). The guests of honor were Lois McMaster Bujold (author), Ctein (artist), and Dave Van Ronk (music). There were 2648 members. David Dyer-Bennet (DD-B) was the chair.

Although none of the materials shown here give the dates of the con, DD-B confirms them, offering as evidence an electronic copy of the guest invitation letters which begin, "I'm writing to you on behalf of the Minicon 27 committee of the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, Inc., to ask you to be our Writer Guest of Honor at Minicon 27. Minicon is always on Easter weekend. In 1992, that's Friday 17-Apr-92 through Sunday 19-Apr-92. It's at the Radisson South hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota (a suburb of Minneapolis). (In addition to being Easter weekend, it also overlaps Passover; first Seder is Friday evening.)"

Membership Totals

The best numbers we have are 2491 pre-registered members, 2648 total, and 2502 warm bodies. The total and warm bodies come verbatim from the "Continuity Notes" for Minicon 27. To get the pre-registered numbers, we take these totals from a handwritten sheet:

• At: 112
• At Child: 12
• Conv.: 335
• Conv. child: 18
• Late pre-reg: 33

Counting late pre-reg as at-the-door (I'm pretty sure this means people paying pre-reg rates, but during the con), this means 157 at-the-door registrations. (Conversions are counted as pre-registrations.) So subtracting gives 2491. There's also an unlabeled column summing to 12 on this handwritten sheet. I'm ignoring that since I don't know what it means. But clearly these numbers are only good to the nearest dozen or so.

Masquerade Video

Here is a video of the Minicon 27 Masquerade. (If you have trouble with the video format, try VLC.) It is a rip of a DVD which is a transfer from VHS. The transfer was done by Jon Hyers, who filmed several years of Minicon Masquerades, but not this one; he just had the tape. The tape says on it "Jeff Barry [Barny?] Videos. Mask 92 copy".

For slightly higher video quality, you can also download all of the files needed to make a copy of the DVD.

Program Book

Here is a scan of the program book (PDF, 134 MB), or here is another version, made as small as possible while still being mostly legible (1.5 MB).

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Badges

Here's a sheet of uncut badges.

Here's a video including images of some of the button badges used in this Minicon era (although apparently not at Minicon 27). These are mostly department or job badges, not general membership badges, although a Minicon 22 membership badge is in there.

T-shirt

Here's the t-shirt with art by Essjay, front and back, respectively:

It was also available in, at least, teal.

And here's the volunteer shirt front (the back is blank):

Not-a-Website

The WWW existed in April 1992, but the only servers were in Europe, and there were only perhaps a dozen of them, all or most of which were at physics laboratories. Also, the Minicon 30 program book strongly implies that Minicon 30 was the first Minicon web site. So we're almost sure that Minicon 27 had no web site. On the other hand, we are a bunch of geeks who don't always communicate well, so who knows? In any case, we have lost any archives that might have existed.