The Frumious Bandersnatch: Now On Substack!

Some history and context

Welcome to the latest iteration of The Frumious Bandersnatch.

My name is Annie. In the 1960s, my dad, Hugh Holub, started an underground newspaper on the University of Arizona campus called THE FRUMIOUS BANDERSNATCH.

It was printed on yellow paper and distributed around campus. Literal “yellow journalism.” It was biting, satirical, and unapologetically anti-war, to the point that my dad had an FBI file during the Nixon Administration.

In the 1990s, when we first got Internet access, my dad revived the paper online, where he would update it “sort-of weekly” with recent “fake news” (before that meat something else entirely) and bad how-to advice. In the days before social media really took off, the Bandersnatch was almost viral— for a while, it had high traffic around the world, with loyal readers.

Hugh passed away suddenly in September of 2011. My sister Beth and I keep the site alive, although it hasn’t been updated since his death. It’s a glimpse into the way the Internet looked in the early days— pre-Javascript, all HTML tables and coded by hand.

For years we thought about how to revamp the site into the 21st century. But both of us work full time in other capacities (I’m a high school English teacher; she owns her own marketing, design, and PR company for classical musicians), and we don’t exactly have the cash flow to devote to completely reworking an outdated website or the time to generate new content.

So bandersnatch.com “lives” on in a cryogenic state, frozen in 2011. It’s messy, and it’s hard to read and update.

And then along came Substack. Finally, an easy way for me to defrost the old Frumious Bandersnatch.

Can you access all of the free stuff on the original website? Sure. But we’re hoping you’ll enjoy a weekly blast from the past straight into your inbox. Some of the articles are still just as relevant as they were more than 10 years ago. And some are just fun to read for those of you who knew my dad and appreciated his sense of humor, and the work he did as an environmental attorney in southern Arizona. (He was the originator of the Free Baja Arizona movement, for example.)

We hope you’ll subscribe.

And if you’re extra awesome, consider subscribing to my other Substack, What My Kids Are Watching.