Glasgow Women’s Library - A Ring of Zines
From August 2022 - January 2023, I was doing a placement (supported by CHASE, who fund my PhD) at Glasgow Women’s Library.
It was very different to my experience in Athens. For one, I didn’t get Covid. It was much colder and wetter in Glasgow in winter. Athens is a DIY collection connected to an arts space, where GWL was like a proper archive (my first time using those rolling shelves, felt like I was in Angels and Demons with Tom Hanks, dodging the illuminati and inexplicably unable to read Italian?) And whilst in Athens I was quite public-facing, at GWL I spent much of my time with my noise-cancelling headphones on, on the mezzanine, reading zines.
I feel like I learnt loads - including the optimum configuration of clothes for walking in the rain from Queen Street to GWL, and that faced with train strikes, snowstorms and flooding, commuting to glasgow from fife is not always a happy prospect! Shout out to the folks who put me up overnight to save me from a journey. I’ve also never really worked with older zines before - EZL, Wellcome Collection and the Athens Zine Bibliotheque have mostly contemporary zines. It brought up a whole different set of questions and feelings, and made me try out some different things.
I wanted to include some visual information about the zines (especially in the Constellations zine). Rather than photographing the zines, I drew these dinky pictures of each of them instead. It felt like getting to know the zine in a different way. It also meant I felt less worried about asking permission - something that would be especially hard for older zines, and many zines in the collection didn’t have names attached. But then I worried that I was taking a shortcut - if I’d just been making a zine as a zinemaker I wouldn’t have worried, but I’m a researcher now (like it or not!) and that feels like it carries different responsibilities. I don’t know!
As a founding member of Edinburgh Zine Library, I’ve always been interested in how people navigate zines, and spending time in Glasgow Women’s Library’s collection had me thinking about how people might use the collection, how they might find their way through these 12 archival boxes. On my first day at GWL, as I was just finding my feet, I was inspired by the zine review zines and zine catalogues from the 1990s that I came across and decided I would experiment with making my own.
Making the first review zine, it felt like this was an interesting way to create a richer (if idiosyncratic) set of information about the zines in the collection, that users could potentially search through. So as I wrote my little reviews, I also added tags to each of the zines. These tags evolved as I got deeper into the collection and it became apparent that certain features of zines - for example, where they were made - were particularly important in this collection. Although there were 12 boxes, within the time limits of my placement I focused on the first 6 - I hope this unfinishedness feels like an invitation to continue this work! Once the review zines had been written, I collated the tags to produce an index. I then used this index to trace my own ‘constellations’ within the collection.
You can read the ‘Constellations’ zine by downloading it (because this zine contains a lot of visuals, I’m working on an alt. version for screenreaders - bear with!)
Through these constellations I wanted to do more than just think about zines as primary source materials for researching particular topics. Once I’d assembled together the constellations zine, index and the various box review zines I felt like there was something missing. So I ended up my placement writing a zine guide to ‘Making Use of the Zine at Glasgow Women’s Library’ (in this idea of “Use” I’m really drawing from reading Sara Ahmed’s excellent book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use). I wanted to offer some prompt questions for people coming to the zine collection to read zines (maybe for the first time), to get inspiration for making zines, or to research zines or topics that the zines in the collection cover. I spent a whole considering how to hold all these smaller zines together, and then the idea of a key ring (originally I used a carabiner, but I don’t have many to spare!) came to me, and this suited my insatiable desire for wordplay. The title ‘Ring of Zines’ references the ring of keys from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (highly recommend listening to the musical version’s song of the same name) which seemed fitting for a set of zines about GWL.
You can read ‘Ring of Zines: Making Use of the Zines at Glasgow Women’s Library’ by downloading it.
Below are the full texts of the review zines and the index - these are probably only really interesting if you’re in/heading to the GWL zine collection:
I’m just getting together a plain text version of these - expect it here.
Finally, thanks to Nicola and Mae, the archivists at GWL, and everyone else who made me feel so welcome. GWL is great so you should go visit (and read some zines)?
