As part of my MLIS degree, I’m doing a summer internship at the Barnard College Library’s Zine Collection. Yesterday I spent some time exploring the literature surrounding zines, starting with some really exciting books on the subject.
I started with Zine Scene, by Francesca Lia Block and Hillary Carlip. It’s a sort of introduction to zines and zinesters, written in the style of a zine with lots of cut and paste and hard-to-read xeroxed content. Reading the book was a real throw-back to the early 1990s, to the time when zines were just starting to get attention in the mainstream, and Block and Carlip do a great job of introducing some popular (and obscure) zines and zinesters using excerpts and photocopies of pages. There’s some how-to instruction as well, but I’d say that Zine Scene is interesting as a love letter to the genre itself, written at the height of its public hype.
Next I spent some time with Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zine and Politics of Alternative Culture. Duncombe’s approach is more scholarly, looking at zines from a critical standpoint. He presents the recent history of zines and speaks harshly about their commercialization and appropriation by the mainstream. There’s lots of food for thought here, as Duncombe delves into the genre’s influence and relevance throughout the punk era. Duncombe’s book is often cited in other scholarly literature, so it’s a good starting point for any serious research into zines and zine culture.
Of all the books I reviewed, Whatcha mean what’s a zine? was by far my favorite. Written by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson, this book is a sort of instruction manual on how to create zines, aimed at a younger audience, or, at least, at a new generation of zinesters who maybe didn’t grow up with the genre. The other two books focused on a the zine as an artifact from a bygone era of punk/grunge/riotgrrl that I am just a little bit (a very little bit) too young to have been a part of as a kid. But Todd and Watson explore zines as tools for self-expression that have relevance beyond their initial explosion in the 1990s. There’s practical instructions for designing, drawing. folding, copying, and promoting zines, and all the instructions are written in an irreverent and fun style by actual zinesters who are still working in the genre today. While not all scholarly or comprehensive, Whatcha mean what’s a zine? was fun, informative, and spirited.
All three books are in the stacks at Barnard, and probably at your local library, too!
x-posted to Barnard Zines Livejournal
