Zines 101

This blog post is here for when I don’t have enough room in the event description or thing I’m writing to define zines. It’s probably going to end up being revised endlessly, because what zines are is hard to pin down.

Zines are DIY publications. They might take the familiar shape of magazines, booklets, or pamphlets, or might a more unusual shape like a map or a poster. What is distinctive about them is the ways they are DIY. They value the handmade, the amateur, doing things for yourself or together with people you know. They also operate on a different economy from the normal commercial one - and Holly Casio has a great zine essay here about why the economies of zines are important when we are trying to distinguish them from Artists’ Books and other forms of self-publishing.

Although it can be helpful if someone calls what they are doing a zine, it’s not just a question of self-identifying. Some things that people call zines aren’t really zines - Kayne West’s “zine” is an easy example of this. And some things that people don’t call zines are so closely related to zines that it makes sense to think about them in the same breath. Dr Leila Nassereldein makes a compelling argument for the term DIY Publications over zines, particularly in the context of institutional collecting, in this blog post about their critical archives project at the British Library.

Zines have many different histories and sit in a wider landscape of self-publishing as a radical, creative or personal act. Whilst the word zine is often identified as coming from science fiction fanzines in the 1930s, we can trace the histories of zines themselves through the Harlem renaissance, Riot Grrl and Queercore punk culture, the Black Panthers, Victorian women’s scrapbooks and political pamphlets of the 1700s. We can also locate them in a wider global context, for example alongside the Little Magazines movement in India. Zines are full of multiplicity, of diverse voices, stories and histories, and so it’s important that we hold on to their multiple radical lineages instead of looking for a single zine origin story.

Whilst zines aren’t about a single topic, there are ‘genres’ of zines that you might hear people refer to. Examples of these are:

Fanzines - zines around fan culture, about a particular singer, band or music scene, a tv show, film, book or any other form of media

Perzines - short for personal zines, these are zines which deal almost entirely with the life of the zinemaker. They can sometimes feel closer to a diary

Here are some online resources to find out more about zines:

The POC Zine Project

Queer Zine Archive Project

Sherwood Forest Virtual Zine Library

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Edinburgh Green Library Comic