Zine Lust (apologies to Nancy Pearl) September 11, 2007

I have been rummaging through my zine collection, big shopping bags full of zines from swaps, from Powell’s and Elliot Bay Books, and from the Portland Zine Symposium. Oh, and a few bookstores I have visited while traveling whose names I may never remember again.

Zines have been particularly on my mind recently because I am one of the new moderators of the Yahoo group The Zine Pool. The group was previously run by Vickie Enkoff, whom many of you knew and who died last month. Vickie did an amazing number of things despite health problems and confinement to a wheel chair, and was always up for making and swapping zines. So we are carrying on in the Pool and my zine bug is flaring up again. Our first project is a one-page zine; the whole thing is made of a single sheet of paper. A homemade mini-magazine! And I may have to roll out the next “quarterly” issue of Destroy This Zine. It’s already half begun anyway.

The picture above is the centerfold from a 24-hour one-page zine I made for one of Vickie’s swaps a couple of years ago. It was all about towns (most of them are pretty small so I can’t call them cities) in the US whose names are also food–Bacon, Two Egg, Toast, Coffee. Amazing how many there are.

I don’t know where the drive to publish comes from; I’m certainly not the only person around who feels it. Many times I’ve heard someone say “I want to make a zine. I don’t even know how to start but I really, really want to make a zine.” And then they do. And then they’re hooked.

Wikipedia has a pretty good introduction to zines, if you want to go look.