Shaverology

Shaverology, the sequel to Richard Toronto's groundbreaking Shaver Mystery biography, War Over Lemuria, is the encore performance of two of science fiction's most controversial characters: Richard S. Shaver and Raymond A. Palmer. In Shaverology you will read previously unpublished accounts of their everyday lives from the people who knew them best. Was Ray Palmer an unrepentant hoaxer as his critics claim, or was he a true believer? Did Richard Shaver recant his belief in the Shaver Mystery on his deathbed? These questions and more are answered in Shaverology. Shaverology is your round trip ticket to sunny Palm Springs, California, and the home of the late sci-fi publisher William L. Hamling; to Richard Shaver's rock-strewn Wisconsin farm; and to Ray Palmer's vast, uncharted mind. You will also find two amazing chapters written by the daughters of both Palmer and Shaver. All the angst, treachery, suspicion, and hope that made up the Shaver Mystery converge in Shaverology. With more than 170 illustrations mined from the depths of the author's files, Shaverology contains rare, never-before-published artifacts of the Shaver Mystery. In the section "I Remember Shaver!" you will find even greater insights from Shaver's closest friend and "adopted son," Richard Devere Horton. Shaverology is a self-guided tour of the minds and lives of that dynamic sci-fi duo, Richard Shaver and Raymond A. Palmer.So, climb aboard the Shaver Mystery one last time for a wild ride to another era.
About the Author: In 1972 Richard S. Shaver opened a letter from an inquisitive California kid named Richard Toronto. As the story goes, Shaver's reply changed Toronto's life forever. For the next four years until Shaver's death in 1975, Toronto enrolled in Shaver's rock book correspondence course, where Shaver encouraged him to photograph rocks and become a writer. A few years after Shaver's death, Toronto founded Shavertron, a fanzine for Shaver Mystery buffs. In time it gathered a cult following, keeping Shaver's memory alive for 29 issues from 1979 to 1992 as "The Only Source of Post-Deluge Shaverania." It took another 35 years before Toronto wrote the book that became Shaver's first published biography: War Over Lemuria. Since its publication in 2013, Toronto's California-based Shavertron Press has produced several ground-breaking new works on Shaver and the Mystery. ROKFOGO, a two-volume set devoted entirely to Shaver's Outsider Art career of painting and photography, was the first of its kind. The Shavertron collection, Toronto says, is his farewell to Shaver, as he plans to gafiate from the Shaver Mystery in 2014. Toronto attended San Francisco and Sacramento State Universities, graduating in 1994 with a BA in Journalism. He worked in the Arts in Mental Health program at Napa State Hospital in Napa, California, where he taught photography to the criminally insane. He also covered the arts and entertainment beat, among others, as a reporter for a suburban daily newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first magazine article about Richard S. Shaver appeared in Beyond Reality magazine in 1976. In 2002 he converted Shavertron to an E-zine, where it can be found at www.shavertron.com to this day.