Why write zines?
Jun 16th, 2014 by houghtonmodern
Cataloging work has begun on Harvard College Library’s recently acquired 20,000-strong zines collection. Zines are non-commercial, non-professional and small-circulation publications that their creators produce, publish and either trade or sell themselves.
The 600 or so zine titles listed thus far are best described as an eclectic collection of material whose subject matter ranges from personal diaries on the day-to-day life of their authors (known as ‘perzines’) to politics (Anarchist, Socialist, Feminist etc.), religion, work, sex, travel, cooking, art, literature and fan commentary on sports, television and film, music, and science fiction. Although their format varies greatly, most are printed or photocopied and stapled or fastened together, and the material is either the author’s own, or copied and pasted from another, usually unreferenced, source. Material is arranged on the page in any direction, color, shape and size the author sees fit.
In his book Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (1997), Stephen Duncombe traces the history of zines as a distinct medium in the United States from the 1930s when science fiction fans began producing ‘fanzines’ to share science fiction stories and reviews. Forty years later, in the mid-1970s, fans of punk rock music, which was ignored at the time by the mainstream music press, started printing fanzines about their music and cultural scene.
According to Duncombe, it was in the early 1980s that these two currents joined fans of other cultural genres, self-publishers and the remnants of printed political dissent from the sixties and seventies, and cross-fertilized through listing and reviews in network zines like Factsheet Five. By the early 1990s, the emphasis on ‘fan’ zines faded as the culture of zines plain and simple developed and flourished.
During my first two weeks of listing zines, I was interested in getting a sense of why someone would devote time, and often money, to producing, circulating and reading zines. As most zine authors reflect on the zine medium itself, and what participating in zine culture means for them, material was not in short supply. The excerpts below are just three examples from dozens of others on why authors, and in this case, young authors, write zines.
Excerpt 1: ‘All hail me’ by Megan, summer ’96, #8
Excerpt 2: ‘Banana Revolution, Sucka’, issue #4
Excerpt 3: ‘Absolute beginners’
Thanks to Alina Lazar for contributing this post. Alina is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. She is one of the initial cohort of Harvard Library Pforzheimer Fellows, working with curator Leslie Morris at Houghton Library to compile a title listing of Harvard College Library’s Printernet Collection of approximately 20,000 zines. The Printernet Collection was assembled by an anonymous collector, and was purchased by Widener Library in 2012. The current project to create a title list is the first step in the process to decide where the collection, or portions of it, might best be housed at Harvard, and how it will be made available for research.
Great post! Wow, that is a lot of zines! If you need a hand and looking to recruit for the project, I’ll sure jump a plane from North-East England to Harvard in no time.
Would love to see this collection!
Amei a matéria. Quando eu era mais nova, meu chefe me apresentou a Zine que ele editava. Eu ansiava pela leitura daqueles textos incríveis. A diagramação era sensacional. A tipografia era arte para os meus olhos.
Com o avanço da internet esta pratica ficou cada vez menor, pelo menos aqui no Brasil. Gostaria que aquela Zine voltasse a vida e me fizesse ansiar novamente.
Loved the text. When I was younger, my boss showed me the to Zine he edited. I longed for those amazing reading texts. The layout was phenomenal. The typography was art in my eyes.
With the advancement of internet this practice was dwindling, at least here in Brazil. Zine that would like to come back to life and made me yearn again.
Ugh, why do you have to call zines noncommercial? My first 6 issues all turned profit!!
Who’s collection is this that was donated? Some serious gems in there!
Hello,
Jon from the Zine Archive & Publishing Project in the NW. To reiterate Amy Leigh’s Q, where did this 20,000 zine boon came from? was it from one donor? Our collection is about 30,000 pieces but took almost two decades to amass. We’re just thrilled to read this post! good luck with the catalogging!
-j
Thanks for your comments! I just added a note at the end of the post to answer some of the questions posed.
-Heather Cole, Assistant Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, Houghton Library
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