ARTIST’S BOOKS V. ZINES: The Offbeat Fascination of Zines

Zines have an unmistakable sense of immediacy and personality. Reading one can feel like stepping directly into someone else’s thoughts, experiences, or wonderfully specific obsession. They’re gloriously unconcerned with whether the rest of the world shares that obsession.Take Kerbloom! by Art Noose, for example. It’s based on her personal experiences, and she started printing it in Betsy Davids’s carriage house on Betsy’s Vandercook No. 4 press. After grad school, I printed in that same carriage house. Clearly, I missed the part where sharing a press with Art Noose was supposed to make me famous. Wait, is Art Noose famous?

Because they exist outside traditional publishing, zines have long been a home for marginalized voices, niche interests, and countercultural movements. The Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe has an extensive collection documenting everything from race and feminism to activism and everyday life. It turns out that making tiny handmade publications about things you care passionately about is a pretty effective way to preserve history.

Their handmade nature also creates a kind of intimacy that polished commercial publications rarely achieve. Every crooked staple, uneven trim, or slightly over-inked page is a reminder that a real person made this with whatever time, money, and office supplies they could scrounge together. As someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time fussing over paper grain and ink coverage, I find this deeply reassuring.

That's one of the reasons artists and writers keep returning to zines. There are very few rules, complete creative control, and no committee to tell you that your idea is "too weird." In the world of zines, "too weird" is generally considered a selling point.