With the holiday season behind us, it was time for the PulpFest committee to get back to work. On January 17, 2009, Ed Hulse posted a message about people’s travel plans for the Summer months. 2009 turned out to be a great year for travelers, with air fares at historic lows. It’s never to early to make your plans for PulpFest.

Make Your PulpFest Plans Early!

With 2008 receding into memory and the holiday season finally over, the PulpFest committee is back at work, planning and promoting this summer’s top convention for fans and collectors of pulp magazines and other forms of vintage popular fiction.

We’ll be updating this site regularly between now and the end of July, when PulpFest finally gets underway. Make sure you check back every few weeks for information on our programming, updates to our steadily growing list of dealers, and additional tidbits relating not only to the convention but also to our hobby in general.

We realize that, for some of you, it probably seems way too early to start planning a summer excursion. If so, you might want to reconsider: our host hotel, the Ramada Plaza, has already received numerous room reservations from PulpFest attendees—and we expect that number to increase sharply in the weeks and months ahead. Mind you, we’ve had the Ramada set aside a block of rooms that should be more than adequate for our needs. But then, we didn’t expect our people to start reserving rooms before Christmas, as a few of you did.

Our advice is this: if you’re thinking about attending PulpFest—or even if you’re only thinking about thinking about attending PulpFest—reserve your room at the Ramada Plaza some time in the next month or so. Remember, if financial conditions or an emergency of some kind ultimately prevent you from joining us, you can cancel your reservation up to 24 hours before your scheduled arrival without incurring any charge. But if you wait to the last minute to make your reservation, you risk getting shut out. Like we said, that’s probably not going to happen, because the Ramada hosts bigger conventions than ours. But why take the chance when it doesn’t cost you anything but the price of a phone call to make your reservation? Just remember to make sure you mention PulpFest to get our special rate.

At this time we’d also encourage you to check into airfares. Many if not most airlines won’t let you book flights more than six months out, and as of this writing PulpFest is still slightly more than six months in the future. But we’ve noticed that airfares have come down in recent weeks and may well drop further as demand continues to soften. Why not lock in your fare this winter, rather than wait until the peak months of spring or summer, when demand goes up and prices begin to rebound? You’ve still got a couple months, but it might be a good idea to make some inquiries and perhaps monitor ticket prices regularly from the various airline websites. Besides, there’s no way of knowing how long oil prices will remain depressed.

We chose PulpFest’s host city with air travel in mind. Columbus is a “hub” for many domestic airlines and can easily be reached from anywhere in the country. To take one example: Southwest Airlines, which is noted for its highly competitive pricing and good customer service, offers regular flights to Columbus from more than 50 major metropolitan areas. It offers non-stop flights to Columbus from Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington DC, Nashville, Orlando, St. Louis, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, among other cities. Chances are you’ll be able to get a pretty good deal from Southwest if you don’t wait too long to book your flight. And given the economy’s current state, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see some major price wars between the airlines over the coming weeks and months.

While you’re thinking about lodging and travel options, we’ll be hard at work coming up with convention programming and arranging for advertising. As promised, we plan on promoting PulpFest as aggressively as time and money allows, not only appealing to the known community of pulp fans but also reaching out to collector constituencies with related interests. We remain firmly committed to bringing new people into the hobby.

We’ll close by reiterating that PulpFest is your convention. We’re interested in your suggestions and will give them careful consideration. We’ve gotten many great ideas already and want to thank those of you who’ve written us. Your input has been very helpful.

Don’t forget to check back in a few weeks for more PulpFest news!