What Is NAF?

North American Fur, more commonly known as NAF, is an APA-zine. The "APA" part stands for Amateur Press Association; these are groups of people who contribute to their organization's publication and make comments on each other's contributions. "Zine" is short for "fanzine", a non-professional publication (as opposed to, for example, comics printed by a company that pays the creators). There used to be a lot of fanzines around the furry world — prior to the rise of the Web, that was the only way to let people see your art, unless you could get into a professionally-published comic. There used to be several APA-zines around as well, such as Gallery and Huzzah, but they're pretty much gone.

The difference between an APA-zine and a regular APA is that an APA-zine sells copies to the public to defray costs, meaning that members don't have to pay for their copies.

OK, so what does NAF the publication look like?

As printing technology has advanced, NAF has gone through a number of incarnations, but current issues are printed as 8.5" by 11" perfect-bound books with wraparound color covers. Here are some pics of recent issues.

The issues shown here are member copies, which have private pages for comments and such that do not appear in the sale copies. They used to be on blue paper and hence are sometimes called "blue pages". Due to the way we're printing now, we can't insert paper of different colors, so the private pages now have black stripes on the outside edges, which you can see the edges of in the picture above.

Sounds like NAF has a history.

As of this writing (March 2008), nineteen issues spanning nearly 11 years. It was started in 1997 by Paul Groulx (Growl), who published the first three issues. Jarlidium picked it up with issue four when Growl was unable to continue it himself.

What else should I know?

Here is a FAQ for new members, and these are the official policies.