Dave Nee, 1953-2026

A pillar of Bay Area sf fandom died last week. From Dave's husband, Scott Marley, via Sarah Goodman and Rich McAllister, "Dave was just walking down the street when he collapsed and could not be revived."

I'm not one to write a proper obituary. But I know from personal knowledge that Dave was one of the three partners of The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore when it opened in 1977. He would have been about 24 at the time. It had grown out of the Portable Bookstore that he and Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore would bring to aftermeetings of the Little Men club and sell new books to members, often clearing me out of whatever cash I'd intended to keep for the weekend.

Eventually they scraped together the wherewithal to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore, literally between the brick walls of Berkeley's cavernous under-garage mall off Telegraph Avenue - in the space where the Berkeley Public Library's resale book shop is now - licensed the "Change of Hobbit" name from Sherry Gottlieb, and set to business.

It was quite successful for some years, but eventually both other partners left for other things, leaving Dave and a somewhat stable support staff. The shop changed location at least three times before declining bookstore business led it to dribble to a close.

But in the early days it was gangbusters, especially when the presence of the store made it an obvious site for meetings of the Little Men, which had previously subsisted on members' living rooms. Already a veteran of various local newszines Before My Time, Dave started up a monthly club newsletter, usually two pages, sometimes more, titled The Rhodomagnetic Bulletin, after the club's Rhodomagnetic Digest of distant days of yore. This had not just meeting information and relevant news, but articles, often goofy humor by Mike Ward, and reviews. I wrote my first two published reviews, of Humphrey Carpenter's Tolkien biography and then The Silmarillion, at Dave's request for the Rhodomag.

Dave had one other intellectual interest that I shared to an extent, in classical music. But as with his interest in SF as a bookseller, he pursued this to an extreme extent. Dave was the kind of person who'd collect 60 different recordings of Brahms's First Symphony and be ready to discourse on the differences between all of them. I visited his apartment once and it was packed with shelves upon shelves of LPs. He'd also record operas on tape off the radio on the store's sound system, and my greatest sin was to have turned off the radio once because I had to start the meeting. But we'd occasionally have juicy conversations about whither the San Francisco Symphony and so on.

As you've already gathered, Dave was gay. He was just about the first out gay person I ever met (I was from very straightlaced suburbs, and chose Berkeley for college partly to expand my horizons - it worked, too). I remember thinking, "So he's gay. Interesting. But so what?" and I've been comfortable in the company of gays, lesbians, bis, and trans people ever since. I'm sure that Dave's cool and matter of fact attitude towards life helped my understanding.