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Yes; well, to repeat something that I wrote four years ago for Rowrbrazzle ...

There is one project that I have abandoned: writing Animal Masks, the “real book” history of furry fandom. Joe Strike asked at the beginning of January if I would object if he wrote such a book, if I was not going to. Not at all. Since someone asks me every couple of years what happened to my history, here is the sad story.

My Animal Masks book never really got started. Mike Curtis at Shanda Fantasy Arts got the idea for the book in 1997 and asked me to write it. I was enthusiastic about writing a Furry Fandom equivalent of the histories of s-f fandom like Sam Moskowitz's The Immortal Storm and Harry Warner Jr.'s All Our Yesterdays, and I agreed to write it. I also told him that Moskowitz's and Warner's books had each taken ten years to write, and that I would try to finish mine sooner than that but it would still probably take at least five years to do all the in-depth research, interview furry fans throughout the world by correspondence, get photographs & other illustrations, etc. Curtis promptly sent out press releases announcing that the book would be published in two years:

Coming in 1999:
Animal Masks: Anthropomorphics As Modern Totems, the first history of our field, written by Fred Patten.

This is from a ConFurence 9 (January 1998) convention report by Watts Martin:

The History of Furry Fandom panel was also interesting, although it was mostly stuff I already knew. Its host was Fred Patten, who's putting together a book for publication next year called Animal Masks that will be a fifteen-year history of the fandom, apparently a coffee-table compendium useful both to give older fans a clear idea of where the fandom actually came from and to be an introduction to new fans. This is a welcome idea; some of the complaints batted about relating to fan behavior, online and off, trace back to people having very little idea what furrydom really is. The very small number who are ongoing problems seem to take a perverse pride in having no interest in the fandom's history, though--but I suppose the book really isn't aimed at fuggheads. It was also nice to see Mark Merlino at the panel looking relatively relaxed, a state I don't think I've seen him in for years.

This is a letter that I wrote published in Mike Glyer's File 770 #127, November 1998, when I had just stopped giving the project top priority but still planned to write it eventually:

The Fur Frontier

Fred Patten agrees, "Yes, I am writing a history of furry fandom, and Joe Rosales is also planning a 'Brian Aldiss' history of furry/talking animals in popular culture." But he feels that Taral's comments about these projects, quoted in File 770:125, while accurate in general are erroneous in detail. Neither Patten nor Rosales feel their books are "revisionist" views of the same topic, any more than one would claim that Aldiss' The Billion-Year Spree is a revisionist view of Harry Warner's All Our Yesterdays. Rosales will focus on literature and popular culture, and Patten will chronicle furry fandom.

Patten will only supply a broad overview of the history before moving on to his main topic, furry fandom:

There is an Egyptian tomb painting ca. 1500 B.C. of a lion and a gazelle playing whatever the Egyptian equivalent of checkers was. This is a bit more indisputably 'funny animal' than animal-headed gods, or neolithic cave paintings of what might have been anthropomorphized animals but could equally well have been tribal shamans dressed in animal skins. Parables featuring talking animals can be traced from the tales of Aesop and Terence through the Medieval ballads of Reynard the Fox to the refined literary fantasies of the 18th century French Court and the 'Uncle Remus' Afro-American folk tales of the 19th century. (And don't forget the Monkey King tales in the Orient.)

Anthropomorphics have especially proliferated during the most recent 200 years, with the popularization of talking animals in children's' literature (Lewis Carroll, etc.); talking animals in political cartoons (which predate Thomas Nast's Democratic donkey and Republican elephant); advertising mascots like Tony the Tiger and the Trix rabbit; movie and newspaper funny-animal stars like Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse and Pogo Possum; and so on. I will summarize all this in a very broad overview as the Introduction to my history of organized furry fandom. Rosales will concentrate entirely on the history of talking animals through 5,000 years or more of popular culture.

My thesis is that furry fandom coalesced out of sf fandom and comics fandom, blending elements from both of them and achieving its own critical mass in 1983/1984. The first clear signs of the independent furry fandom were the creation of its first apa, Rowrbrazzle, and the decision by some fans to self-publish furry comic books because there seemed to be enough fans of stories with talking animals to support them (as distinct from earlier attempts to self-publish comics which had to hope for sufficient sales from the general public alone.) Some key titles in this evolution of 'furrydom' were Cutey Bunny (which first appeared in October 1982 but attracted attention during 1983), Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger novels starting in mid-'83 (influential in establishing funny animals as respectable reading for adults), and the Rowrbrazzle apa and the comics Albedo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Usagi Yojimbo all during 1984. Critters and Captain Jack weren't until 1986.

Rowrbrazzle started in February 1984. Since it was specifically an apa for writing and drawing funny animals as a genre and discussing the new fandom that was forming about them, it is a handy landmark to say that 'furry fandom existed at this time.' I do not claim, as Taral implies, that furry fandom was started by the birth of Rowrbrazzle. But I have asked whether anyone can supply an earlier date that can be clearly identified as belonging to furry fandom, as distinct from being an isolated furry event within sf fandom (such as the preview of the Watership Down movie at the 1978 Worldcon) or comics fandom (such as R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat in 1968 or Marvel Comics Howard the Duck in 1976); and so far nobody has.

Considering that the worthwhile histories of fandom such as Sam Moskowitz's The Immortal Storm and Harry Warner's All Our Yesterdays and A Wealth of Fable have each taken about a decade to write, I will be very surprised if my book (working title: Animal Masks) is ready for publication as soon as next year.

In 2001 Edd Vick offered to publish it as a MU Press book if I ever finished it, but by then I considered the project dead for the reasons given in this unpublished interview:

Interviewer: You mentioned a history of furry fandom in the book [Best in Show]. Can you tell us about it?

Fred: Since it was in the Afterword, it was of necessity only a very brief summary. In fact at one time around 1998, Mike Curtis of Shanda Fantasy Arts wanted me to write a complete book–length history of Furry fandom, to be titled Animal Masks. I said I would do so, but it never got done for two main reasons. In the first place, I told Curtis it would probably take about five to ten years to do, assuming that it would take about as long as the histories of science fiction fandom that were done. Sam Moskowitz’ The Immortal Storm, his history of science fiction fandom in the 1930s, and Harry Warner Jr.’s All Our Yesterdays, his history of fandom in the ‘40s, both took between five to ten years to write. But Shanda Fantasy Arts wanted to publish it right away. I said, "Well, it’s impossible to write a detailed history like you want that fast." And Curtis said, "Ok if you can’t do it right away then we’ll get someone else who can." I think they announced who their next writer would be, but the book never came out.

The other problem was that so many fans were hostile to the idea. In science fiction fandom even Sam Moskowitz, who was feuding with practically everybody when he announced he was doing his book, got lots of cooperation. Everybody sent him lots of information, and answered whatever questions he sent them. But when I was asking furry fans outside of Southern California for the history of furry fandom in their areas, which I was not personally involved with, they said “Why should we help you? We’ll write our own history that’d be better than anything you could do. We’ll refuse to give you the information, and when your book comes out without the information we’ll tell everybody how incomplete it is.” Someone accused me of being a phony furry fan because I did not wear a fursuit. So I reported to Shanda Fantasy Arts that any history I would write would be very incomplete. Actually, I could have tried to work around the obstructionists, but I was also getting more and more requests to write articles about anime and manga at the same time, and Shanda insisted on getting the furry history immediately, so I just gave up on it. Anyhow, the history that was in Best in Show was so brief that I was able to summarize without having to go into detail. I could just say there are a lot of furry activities such as fanzine publishing, fursuit making, holding conventions and so on, without having to give lots of names and dates.

Another sort of – I don’t know whether you would call this a problem or not in furry fandom, but more science fiction fans used their real names, or if they used nicknames their real names were pretty well known. Like you could say that Jack Bristol was really Jack Speer but he did most of his fan activities using the name of Jack Bristol. Ted Johnstone’s real name was David McDaniel. But too many of the furry fans have only their fannish names known; and obviously phony names at that. I at least would find it difficult to do a serious history about people who are only identified by names like Gizmo, Vixyy [sic.] Fox and Hyperwolf. So I guess that was another problem with writing a detailed history of furry fandom.

Yet another reason why it would have been very difficult to write a history of Furry Fandom comparable to the histories of s-f fandom in the 1930s and 1940s was that the s-f fans of that time were paper hoarders, not only of fanzines but of correspondence. When Moskowitz and Warner asked for historical information for their books, fans could loan them original letters and old fanzines that included names & dates, detailed convention reports six and eight pages long, and so forth. Too much of Furry Fandom's history took place over the Internet and nobody has a "hard" record of it; and fans' ideas of convention reports today is a one-page "I went to the con and it was a lot of fun". My preliminary questions got too many answers of, "Gee, that happened a long time ago, and I don't remember the details."

Most of what I knew about furry fandom’s history is covered in my 1996 Chronology of Furry Fandom in Yarf! which is now on WikiFur. Since WikiFur started a couple of years ago, it has added historical details that I never knew. So a history of furry fandom is even more desirable today than it was ten years ago; but – especially since my stroke has put me into bed and made it impossible to juggle old fanzines, correspondence, conduct interviews, etc. – I am not the one to write it. Good luck, Joe.

Joe Strike, what has happened to your book on the history of furry fandom?