Posts Tagged ‘fanzines’

A Rigorously Unscientific Study of Zines, Zinesters and Zine-making According to the Internet

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

A Rigorously Unscientific Study of Zines, Zinesters and Zine-making According to the Internet

Yesterday was the highlight of the zinester’s year: the London Zine Symposium 2010. I wasn’t in the best of moods at the beginning. Flicking through fanzines, I began to get quite irritated with drunk vegan anarchists and all the same boring things they write about eating out of skips and living in trees. And art students! Five quid for a zine that doesn’t even have any words in it?

I was still feeling grumpy after last year’s humiliation. On the one day of 2009 when every zine reader in Britain was in the same room as me, I failed to sell a single copy of my lovingly cut and pasted and printed and stapled Space Times (still a work of genius, still boxed up by the dozen at home). Bloody zine people with your knitted Mooncups and your BA in Fine Art and your lack of interest in my zines.

This year I’d decided to manage expectations and just print a few copies of my new thing, A Rigorously Unscientific Study of Zines, Zinesters and Zine-making According to the Internet. It’s filled with semi-credible data that I’ve gleaned from web searches, represented as graphs, pictures or quotations. Did you know, for example, that there are as many books about fanzines as there are about bricklaying, Alice Cooper and Cornish nationalism put together? Or that Lidl is six times more likely to be mentioned online in conjunction with zines than any other supermarket? We could almost say that Lidl is the zinester’s supermarket of choice.

I put my little pile of Rigorously Unscientifics on the ‘individual zine table’ and tried not to look at them sitting there as I went round the stalls. I bought some lovely things: Saban Kazim’s really great comic about going to the job centre; an interesting history of the Mayor of Garratt, a fictional position that was elected in the 18th century as a parody of corrupt parliamentary elections; and Joe Decie’s beautifully illustrated guide to the various British English uses of the word ‘piss’. I got ‘Pissing in the Wind’ as a present for a Canadian friend, but now I’m thinking I might accidentally forget to give it to her.

By the end of the afternoon, things were looking up. The rain had eased, Josie Long had made us laugh and I’d eaten an excellent vegan flapjack. I went to see what had become of my new zines. “Oh, you’re the one who made them!” said the people minding the stall, “They were really popular. They’ve all sold out!” Woo-hoo! Thank you anarchists! Thank you art students! I should never have doubted you.

  • If you’d like a copy of A Rigorously Unscientific Study of Zines, Zinesters and Zine-making According to the Internet, please send £1 + a bit for P&P by PayPal to this address here.