Rocket, rocket, who has the rockets.
While writing about the Hugo situation in 1955 the other day I mentioned that Ron Smith won a Hugo in 1956 for his fanzine, Inside. This particular award is of special interest to me because as far as I’m aware the rocket Ron was awarded is the only one that has had a long-term residency in Australia. I’ve read that it was displayed in the window of Merv Binns’ Space Ago Books in Melbourne for many years after Ron Smith moved to Australia in, I think, the early sixties. I can’t vouch for that because I only managed to visit Space Age a couple of times while the store was still a going concern and was too eager to get inside to be concerned about what might be in the window display. Space Age Books is of course has long been a thing of the past now and presumably Ron Smith has passed away too so that makes me wonder what happened to his rocket? I’m assuming that when Space Age Books stopped being a bricks and mortar establishment the rocket went back to Ron (if not before that) but I can’t be certain. Hopefully somebody living in Melbourne reading this will know the answer to my query or perhaps be able to dig an answer out of Merv.
Anyway, having begun this line of thought I started to wonder if anybody has made any attempt to track down the location of the various Hugo statues that have been handed out in the past 65 or so years. I’m not thinking so much about those awarded in recent decades as I assume all those recipients are still alive and have their rockets somewhere safe. On the other hand I don’t think many of the award winners prior to 1970 other than Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison are still with us. Now in some cases, Robert Heinlein, Philip Dick, and Frank Herbert for example, I imagine their rockets are safe with whichever organisation their papers were donated to, but what about those authors like Mark Clifton or Eric Frank Russell who drifted away from the field before they passed away? For that matter a quick count shows 17 Professional Magazine, 16 Professional Illustrator, 21 Fanzine/Fan, 8 Dramatic, and 13 Miscellaneous Hugo Awards were handed out prior to 1970. I have to wonder how many of those rockets do we know the location of?
This strikes me as a useful project to tackle. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be curious to know where they all those awards ended up.
Any answers?
Doctor Strangemind 
“but what about those authors like Mark Clifton or Eric Frank Russell ”
Eric Frank Russell’s Hugo (for “Allamagoosa”) was part of the archive donated to the University of Liverpool by his daughter when the Science Fiction Foundation Collection came here in 1993.
We also hold John Brunner’s Hugo for STAND ON ZANZIBAR, which Brunner left to the Science Fiction Foundation along with his other awards.
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That’s nice to know because those were two of the fiction Hugos I thought most likely to have disappeared into the aether. I see I’ll have to start constructing a spreadsheet.
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