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Zine Adventures in New York City
When she travels, Jessica Lewis likes to seek out zine-related activities. She is a member of the new Broken Pencil editorial board, and her zine enthusiasm also lives in her other endeavours such as
Zines, although they’re called ephemera in library lingo, are actually a lot more permanent than blogs. The zine reader gets to keep the thing forever. When the reader returns to the zine, unless zhe has spilled coffee on it or wrought some other type of damage, it will be the same. It may disappear due to the holder’s negligence, but not because the zinester couldn’t maintain hir domain name or website or could have, but got sick of doing so. A factor so significant in defining the difference between zines and blogs that it’s shocking this issue is so far down in this piece is that zines are finished products (even if serials catalogers don’t think so). Blogs are not. No matter how sloppy a zine is—and they really can be a mess—someone has taken responsibility for the thing as a whole. Blogs are in danger of only being as strong as their most recent post. The pressure is to add to it daily. Zinesters also put pressure on themselves to produce more regularly, but ultimately it doesn’t matter much. I am sad when my friend Celia [13] doesn’t send out a new zine for a year, but that doesn’t make me any less likely to read the new one when it finally comes. In fact, the delay adds to the thrill. If the blogger doesn’t post for a couple of weeks, zhe may lose hir readership altogether.
Self-published and micro-published works are vital to the library community. They exhibit subject matter often overlooked by larger publishing companies, and provide a platform for local authors to present their works. We are gathering local materials for our catalog including: small-press-issued graphic novels and poetry, self-published cookbooks, zines, memoirs, niche non-fiction, local history, and university press research and literature. It is our goal to use this historic neighborhood venue to showcase the works of local authors and artists.