13 Comments
Apr 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Zines and small presses were how we found out about non-mainstream stuff pre-internet. Today any goofball can find sh** on the internet and go down deep into crazy-land. Back then, you had to really work at it! And it was fun!

Expand full comment

Brings me back to my days as an 80s punk. I had a few friends who tried their hand at making a few. They used to be left at Middle Earth Records in my hometown of Downey, Ca.

Expand full comment
Apr 4, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

A friend turned me onto Stack magazines, a service that curates independent magazines and sends a selected title every month. This is broader than Zines but overlaps and many titles have the same ethos. I love the surprise of opening the package to see what they sent each month. https://www.stackmagazines.com/

Expand full comment
Apr 3, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

I am a regular at Silver Sprocket. It’s the best thing to happen to San Francisco in a long time. I regularly take my teen daughters there to indoctrinate them. I will keep my eye out for you next time I am in there!

I used to be an editor for “Anything That Moves” a bi zine in the 90s. At one point we had a print run into the thousands.

Expand full comment
Apr 3, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

In the UK there's a tradition of zines tied to particular football club's fans. Some of these were writing about issues of corporatization, racism, homophobia, etc long before more mainstream writers took up these causes.

I don't think there's an equivalent in the US (would love to be proved wrong). Perhaps it's because sports has long been more commercial here, although English football is now a huge global business.

Expand full comment

Wish I'd read your post before writing this: http://cdn.oreillystatic.com/radar/r1/06-95.pdf

Expand full comment
Apr 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Hi Noah, I believe the primary store link for V Vale's "How To Stay Together Forever" is https://www.researchpubs.com/shop/p/how-to-stay-together-forever-by-krusty-wheatfield-v-vale since he runs research pubs. Source: https://twitter.com/valeresearch

Expand full comment

Just here to say how much I appreciate this post, Mr. Smith.

I was in the Bay Area punk scene in the 90's, and it was just a glorious mess of making things. Finding and participating in subcultures and their found families profoundly affected how I viewed and approached the world afterwards. I wonder if this phenomenon has been studied at all?

Anyway, after moving to the UK from the Bay Area, and feeling the disconnection after being away during lockdowns, my partner and I made a little zine just for our close friends and family, meant to kind of replace and subvert the usual boring family Christmas letter (we called it "The Annual Rapport" har dee har.) Instead of doing the Christmas letter classic of listing all the notable accomplishments/trips/job-updates etc, we interviewed each other and presented the interviews with poems, photo-essays, sidebars...you know zine stuff...it was a great way of connecting with our found and regular families while simultaneously making something together. 5 outta 5, would recommend trying it.

Expand full comment

Wow, I remember zines. I was cleaning out the garage and came across some that I kept like Too Much Coffee Man (Mars Needs Coffee), Not Available (I bought the Cynical Man movie download) and a host of others. It's good to know they're still around. (I put out a few zines with friends back in the 1960s. My mom had access to a mimeograph machine. Wow, did those fresh copies smell good, but I think real zines needed relied on the xerographic process. That was patented back in '59, so the patent expired in '79. By the mid 80s, zines started appearing, almost on schedule. There's nothing like patent expiration to spur innovation. and I'm not saying that sarcastically.

Expand full comment

What a great, uplifting post.

Expand full comment

One thing a zine writer pointed out to me a few years ago when the community was suggesting he put his stuff for free on internet (since he was just recouping costs, not making money) - he said that people value his writings more if they have to pay for it.

He didn't like the idea of his stuff being downloaded for free and then sitting unread on a hard drive... And I have to say, he's right. I valued his zines way more than stuff I could get for free on internet... :)

Probably a good sign for Substack!

Expand full comment