A To Zine
Zinesters are still adding a personal touch to a wide range of topics
By Kyle Rindinella
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Illustration by Nicole Hambleton |
Sitting on his floor, David Waldman is surrounded by stacks of paper, a stapler, and a knife. Assemble, fold, cut, stack, repeat. Thi is what Waldman does in his free time as a zinester.
Since 2002, Waldman has been creating Kid with a Camera, a zine based around the growing music and art scene in Toronto. “I found it interesting,” he says. “There was a scene that no one was really documenting and it became really big over the next four to five years.”
Zines, short for fanzines and pronounced ‘zeen,’ are self-produced publications. They usually consist of photocopied pages with stapled or sewn bindings.
Although the history of the zine is often debated, Stephen Duncombe, author of one of the most read zine books, Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, says zines have their roots in 1970s British punk culture.
There are no standard criteria for people making zines just as there are no standard criteria for people making music.
“You cannot define them or put them under one umbrella,” says Sonia Edworthy, who runs Halifax’s Anchor Archive Regional Zine Project (AARZP). “There are as many different zines as there are people making them.”
Edworthy, along with her friend Sarah Evans, has been serving the Halifax zine community for the past seven years. They attend fairs to share and expand their own personal collections, which prompted them to open a front room of their house for a library.
“There was nowhere else in the region to find information on independent media and culture,” says Edworthy. “We knew many others who didn’t know where to go to share and meet the community.”
The AARZP now has between 1,500 and 2,000 zines in its library, which were acquired through buying and trading.
Like the AARZP, the Toronto Zine Library (TZL) was created by friends Patrick Mooney, Tara Bursey and Suzanne Sutherland in 2005. They were also collectors who decided they needed a space to house their collection, and open a proper library where people could thumb through, read or take out zines.
Mooney, a CBC librarian, says the TZL currently has 1,800 zines available to the public with many being added weekly.
Just as magazines have varying niche markets and areas of interest, so do zines. “There are just as many creative zines as there are uncreative ones,” Mooney says. You can find zines about everything from cooking to lamps.
One zinester who has copies in the TZL is Siue Moffat, creater of Marcie’s Book of Vegan Recipes for Non-Picky People, a vegan cooking zine. Moffat started her first zine in high school to protest the school’s newspaper, which she felt didn’t represent her or her interests. From there, Moffat put out her first cooking issue in 1996 and a second in 1999. Both issues have sold out repeatedly and Moffat has had to reprint many times over the years. The success of the issues persuaded her to self-publish a vegan dessert cookbook.
Zinesters do not always stay small and independent.
Eric Nakamura went to newsstands in Los Angeles to find zines he was interested in. “There was no other magazine on what my friends and I wanted to read, Asian pop culture and punk music,” Nakamura says.
So he created his own.
Nakamura began Giant Robot when he was 24 with his friend Martin Wong “with no budget, no bureaucratic meetings, and no excuses to anyone.”
The zine has grown more than 100 times larger than its original run of only 240 copies.
Gradually, Giant Robot was able to move from the standard zine size of a folded half-page to full magazine size in 1996. Also, they were able to secure distribution, printing and shelf space to turn Giant Robot into a magazine with accolades from L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times.
Content throughout Giant Robot has essentially stayed the same, covering movie stars, musicians, skateboarders, toys, technology, and history. Most of the articles are written by Nakamura, Wong, or one of their friends, never professional writers or journalists. “People with a story to tell,” as Nakamura puts it.
One form of media creeping into the zine world is the Internet. With people creating their own MySpace and Facebook web pages, blogs and personal soapboxes, why hasn’t the zine become extinct in print and available strictly online?
“There is a feeling of giving someone a zine,” says Waldman. “They can hold it, it is theirs. They would have to make an effort to toss it out whereas a website can disappear anytime.”
For this reason, Waldman wants to preserve his zine as a physical object.
Nakamura agrees. “I still like to buy magazines,” he says. “And I think people do, and will for a while.”
Waldman says he sometimes puts more than 200 hours into creating a single edition of Kid with a Camera. When he spends four to five hours at a concert shooting the show, an hour speaking to bands afterwards, upwards of 10 hours organizing, proofing and writing, and repeating the process five to 10 times per issue, the effort and expense easily add up. But for Waldman, it’s all done for the pleasure of putting together, at the risk of sustaining repeated paper cuts to his fingers, something that is his own.