I'm a speaker for @partnersinprint.bsky.social's online Print Futures this Sunday (2pm ET 4/26)! Join us—I'll be talking about my letterpress experimentation (especially w/lasers) & accessibility work (letterpress for the people! silly letterpress for the joyful people!) w/2 other emerging printers:
The author uses a lot of "allegedly," presumably to seem impartial? ...But also his bio includes a very long list of UFO associations 🙃
An early American edition (1845) of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on the left; the first American edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1899) on the right.
A paperback copy of The Beats, edited by Seymour Krim. Copy says, "Raw, penetrating stories, poems and social criticism," and includes work by Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others.
Beautiful copy of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility with an ornate, flowery cover designed by Hugh Thomson.
1957 magazine, Flying Saucers: Fact or Fiction? by Max B. Miller.
Highlights from the Indianapolis Rare Book Fair yesterday (couldn't resist buying the Flying Saucers: Fact or Fiction? for $6):
Cover of No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped it by Adele Bertei features a black and white photo of three young women with the title and author text in pink and blue.
Virtual event featuring Adele Bertei on her new book, No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene. Just registered for this: citylights.com/events/adele....
Me too!
And total cost: $81.56.
Screenshot of "Zen and the Art of Mimeo Maintenance" article in issue one of the Whole Fanzine Catalog by Brian Earl Jones.
The first issue of Whole Fanzine Catalog (1978) ends with an article to help aspiring zine makers understand the labor & cost involved. He breaks it down step by step & concludes, "You can count on a 24 page fanzine of 200 copies to take about 50 hours to produce." fanac.org/fanzines/Who...
It will be recorded (in case you can’t make it)!
Cover of Trouble Maker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan features a close up of Mitford's face in black and white with the title and author name in red text.
Next week I'm hosting a virtual event w/ biographer Carla Kaplan & two of her research assistants on her new book about Jessica Mitford & doing archival research w/ RBML's Jessica Mitford Papers. Will be an interesting discussion! You can register at: library.osu.edu/events/troub...
Screenshot of podcast logo for ICYMI next to title of episode, "Wikipedia Is the Most Human Place on the Internet"
If you're looking for something funny and/or hopeful, I'd recommend listening to this episode of ICYMI about Wikipedia: slate.com/podcasts/icy...
Thanks, I have read this and think it’s brilliant but somehow wasn’t following Lea here (now corrected!).
Oh interesting. I’ve found some of the most exciting zine scholarship (to me anyway!) are dissertations and theses.
And yes, I can imagine this would be weird to stumble upon!
Really interesting, thanks for sharing!
Ah, sorry that you found out this way.
Screenshot of title page of Izabeau Legendre's Margins in Motion: Towards a Political History of Zine Culture
Rereading Izabeau Legendre's Margins in Motion: Towards a Political History of Zine Culture (2023), such an incredibly thoughtful & well researched work on zine history:
queensu.scholaris.ca/server/api/c...
That's an incredible number! How do you decide what to accept?
All of these people self-published at some point in their work:
Margaret Atwood
Stephen King
Beatrix Potter
Edgar Allan Poe
Mark Twain
Walt Whitman
Virginia Woolf
Benjamin Fucking Franklin might be your table neighbor at a zine fest if he was alive today.
I don't think there's any danger of Riot Grrrl disappearing; I regularly encounter undergrads who know about it (which, given the amount of coverage its gotten in the last several years, maybe isn't surprising). Curiously, many students who know about zines first encountered them in the classroom.
Yes, exactly!
Broadside by the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association that begins, "Men of Ohio, Why do you speculate about the results of woman suffrage? Look at the ten stats where women vote and know what women do!"
A DEVO Tyvek hello suit
Two of my favorite things in the Decorative Arts Center's exhibit of Ohio history in 250 objects:
Also, it may be obvious but just want to note: these new publications are the works of small presses & self-publishing.
Cover of the Homocore Anthology features a scattered assortment of issues of the zine.
Homocore Anthology open to show a page of front matter of issue 5 on the left and letters from readers on the right.
Received the new Homocore Anthology. Really love the (growing?) trend of zines being reproduced in full. This comes closer to conveying what the original publications were really like & is infinitely more interesting & fun to read than the zine books that used to do just highlights & excerpts.
Mazza Museum gallery featuring original artwork by author and illustrator Marc Brown along the walls. In the foreground, a statue of his protagonist, Arthur, a third grade aardvark, sits writing at a school desk.
Gallery celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States that features illustrations from a variety of artists.
Several pieces of Stephen Gammell's artwork from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Visited the University of Findlay's Mazza Museum, the world’s largest collection of original artwork by children’s book illustrators. Definite highlight was seeing Stephen Gammell's mesmerizing / traumatizing artwork for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Screenshot from the Oxford English Dictionary which shows the earliest use of "nerd" in an issue of Newsweek in 1951 and then a later example from the Observer in 1971.
Looking at the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest known uses of "nerd" & lol'd at the 1971 example from the Observer, "Nerds are people who don't live meaningful lives."
photograph or a poster on cream colored paper. "Dear President Ambar, we are writing to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old. This is a machine that we all know well. With it, we misspell words without the crutch of spell check or generative AI and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in a cognitive dialogue with ourselves. We do not seek perfection because we know that education is about the growing and challenging of our young minds' potential, not the chasing of institutional 'gold-star' approval. We do not believe that your so-called 'Year of AI Exploration; providing enterprise ChatGPT and Google Gemini subscriptions to every Oberlin student aligns with our college's founding principles. You claim that this year will be one of experimentation, not adoption. But even just one semester of accepted (encouraged even) chat bot use will jettison our student body down a lazy and irredeemable tunnel of intellectual destruction. We are a college grounded in learning and labor, which now risks straying from these rooted ideals. With ChatGPT at the helm, our emails, essays,and discussion posts will be generated for us, not by us. And let's not fool ourselves. This is precisely what these platforms will be used for by our busy, anxious student body. We see your vision for this year as.advancing the college's 'businessification'--an alarming trend also seen in the takeover of our beloved library cafe by a 'bookstore' with no books in stock and an app replacing customer service. In one instance, the college assumes we want efficiency at all costs through automated rather than hand pulled coffee. In the other lies the false belief that we simply desire to turn in an essay, regardless of how little we've written of it." there's more that doesn't fit in the 2000 character limit :(
OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚
Have been thinking a lot lately about the memoir boom of the 1990s & the explosion of personal zines during the same decade & wondering if there's a relationship between the two. They seem such separate worlds, but both point to an intense, growing interest in the stories of ordinary people.
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Frontpiece shows two anthropomorphic oysters holding silverware. On the title page there is an oyster sitting in its opened shell, with oysters in closed shells behind it.
Just came across The Oyster; Where, How and When to Find, Breed, Cook and Eat (1861) in a dealer listing & am in love with the illustrations on the title page & frontispiece: archive.org/details/oyst....
Cover of The Big Springs Country of the Missouri Ozarks shows a lake with rolling hills in the background.
Introductory pages focus on "The Woods of Big Springs Country" and "Agricultural Advantages" with black and white photos showing the local area.
Map of Missouri showing paved, gravel, dirt, and unimproved roads. The southeast section of Missouri is outlined in black.
Antique store find today: The Big Springs Country of the Missouri Ozarks (c. 1927), a promotional booklet encouraging tourism to southeast Missouri by highlighting scenic, rural views (but also drivable roads & access to phones). Came with a map showing the status of roads throughout the state.