The UT Libraries tabled at the 8th Annual Lone Star Zine Fest on October 19th and 20th. We Librarians were able to connect with the local community of zinesters through outreach as well as purchasing new materials for the collection.
What is a zine? To put it simply, a zine is a DIY publication, traditionally made on printer paper, meant to spread awareness of a particular issue or to find certain communities that share the same interests. Historically, zines have been used to bypass the barriers of traditional publishing, making them a speedy and inexpensive way to share information utilizing print materials.
The Blue Genie Art Bazaar (the site chosen to host the fest) was filled to the brim with zines that October Weekend. With over 100 vendors, we zine librarians had our work cut out for us. Not only did we table at the fest to promote UT’s free-to-read zine collection, we also prepared for purchasing and were eager to find new titles to add to the stacks.
Tabling at the fest brought a few new challenges. Last year’s fest ran for one day, while this year it grew into two. This is due to the huge success of the previous year’s event, with over 1000 people attending the fest. We spread the word to the UT Libraries community and received interest from fellow staff and graduate research assistants in assisting us with our outreach efforts. Having volunteers as extra eyes at the event proved to be more helpful than we thought. They brought back fabulous purchase suggestions as they perused the vendors throughout the building.
With pen and paper in hand, we scoured the building looking for locally-made zines that would add oomph to our current collection, such as comic zines for the Fine Arts Library and chapbooks for the PCL Poetry Center. We also looked for zines on topics that would resonate with students and could be added to our teaching toolkit for zine workshops we hold periodically throughout the year. Two of our favorite vendors – Chan Channel and Table for Two Publications – are alumni from the College of Fine Arts who often visited the Fine Arts Library. They were excited to meet us and thrilled to have their work represented in our zine collection for future art and design students. All in all, we purchased over 100 zines at the fest for the Libraries!
Our outreach at the Lone Star Zine Fest was a major success. We talked to over 400 attendees about the collection, surprising many with the fact that the UT Libraries are open to the public. Many expressed interest in visiting campus (we look forward to seeing y’all)! This concludes our sixth year tabling at the fest and we hope to continue to do so for many years to come.
Are you interested in learning more about the UT Zine Collection? Please visit our LibGuide here.
In April, Dr. Adrien Smith, assistant professor of Instruction in the Department of Germanic Studies took her Yiddish class (YID 612) into the recording studio at the Fine Arts Library’s Foundry makerspace to capture the essence of traditional Yiddish folk songs.
The project was part of a year-long, accelerated language course that not only aimed to teach the Yiddish language but also to immerse students in its rich culture and history. The course utilized a range of instructional methods, including board games, songs, poetry, textbooks, and grammatical exercises. The rigorous approach fostered a close-knit community of students passionate about Yiddish language and culture.
Dr. Smith sought to create an engaging and practical learning experience for her students. She envisioned a project that would allow her students to practice their language skills and provide them with a lasting memento of their efforts. To achieve this, she attended a training session at the Foundry’s recording studio, with the hope of gaining the skills necessary to record her students singing traditional Yiddish folk songs.
After her training, Dr. Smith and the Foundry team met in late March to plan the recording sessions. They decided to hold two sessions: one focused on a group recording and another on small group projects. They carefully considered the logistics, including accommodating about a dozen students and instruments in the studio, selecting appropriate microphones, and allocating sufficient time for the recordings.
The first session took place on April 15. Nearly a dozen students, accompanied by a professional accordionist, gathered in the studio. Dr. Smith directed the students while the Foundry team assisted with the recording equipment and software. After a few test recordings, they successfully captured the entire class singing “Der alef-beys iz zeyer sheyn” and “Got hot bashafn himl mit erd.”
The second session, held on April 22, focused on small group recordings for a final project. Dr. Smith, now comfortable with the recording equipment, managed the session independently. She successfully recorded five more folk songs, which she later edited and published on SoundCloud, featuring cover art designed by one of her students.
This collaboration between Dr. Smith and the Foundry highlights the valuable opportunities the Foundry offers to modern languages and humanities courses. Recording sessions like these allow students to practice their language skills in a dynamic and cultural context, and, additionally, the recorded performances serve as a tangible reminder of their learning experience.
Dr. Smith and her students thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and she looks forward to the opportunity of returning to the Foundry for projects in future semesters.
A graduate costume design class recently visited the Fine Arts Library to learn more about library resources. I was thrilled to be able to share with them excerpts from performances by Sharir+Bustamante DanceWorks, projecting video clips such as 2001’s Automated Body Project on our media wall. To everyone’s delight, we then had the chance to view the actual physical costumes seen in the video footage, examples we now understand as early explorations in wearable technology.
Wearable Technology. Photo by Mark Doroba
It was exciting to witness the students engage with these artifacts, thoughtfully analyzing form and function through the lens of design; posing insightful questions; and drawing connections to their course material, ongoing discussions, and personal experiences.
This interactive instructional opportunity was only possible through the generous donation of Dr. Yacov Sharir, who gifted his archive to the Fine Arts Library in 2016. Sharir came to Austin in 1978 to start the American Deaf Dance Company and became faculty at UT shortly thereafter. In 1982, the Sharir Dance Company became the professional company-in-residence at the UT Department of Theatre and Dance. (The company later took the name Sharir+Bustamante Danceworks in 1998, acknowledging José Luis Bustamante as co-artistic director). Sharir was an early innovator in the area of dance and digital technology, and his work has had a profound impact not only on the University, but on the Austin modern dance community as a whole.
Sharir Dance Company, Wise Heart (1988). Photo by Jon Leatherwood
Sharir passed away on September 29, 2023, at the age of 83, leaving behind a rich legacy as an artist, educator, and mentor. As we remember, honor, and celebrate this legacy, the gift of his archive takes on a deeper meaning, an enduring offering for many more groups of students and researchers to come.
Sharir Dance Company. Cyber Human Dances (1996)
I encourage you to explore the Sharir and Sharir/Bustamante Dance Collection which includes videos, photographs, programs, press materials, art, costumes, and virtual reality equipment. It features the choreography of Sharir and Bustamante through the 2007 final season of S+BDW and beyond, along with the work of many guest artists and collaborators. Owing to the combined efforts of former Theatre and Dance Librarian Beth Kerr, research assistant Katie Van Winkle, and many folks in UT Libraries’ Digitization Services, a large portion of the collection has been digitized, and is openly accessible to the public on Texas ScholarWorks.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.
Zines have long been a medium for weirdos, freaks, and outcasts on the margins, which means they’ve been a staple of queer expression. The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) has been digitizing and preserving queer zines for twenty years!
First of all, what are zines? Zines are DIY publications, usually staple-bound and made with printer paper. They’re cheap and easy to produce, and most zine makers give them away for free or sell them at low prices to recoup costs. This allows them to bypass mainstream publishers, so zines are often a medium for marginalized and radical voices.
Zines developed out of Science Fiction fan culture in the 1930s. In the 1970s, the onset of photocopying technology coincided with the rise of punk music. Punk fans (who often overlapped with Sci-fi fans) latched onto zines as a way to write about their favorite bands, share stories, and build community. As such, zines have always been a venue for outsider expression and radical politics. In the 1990s, feminist and queer zine makers really took hold of the medium. Punk communities might have been made up of outcasts, but they weren’t immune to misogyny and homophobia. Women and LGBTQ punks experienced marginalization and discrimination within their scenes, and zines provided a much-needed space to voice these experiences and find other like-minded queers.
So a project like QZAP is pretty revolutionary! This searchable database is run by a collective based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it is and will remain free and open to use. QZAP’s goal is to create a “living history” so they continue to accept new submissions from contemporary queer zine makers. They hold a broad definition of “queer,” too, recognizing that identities and language change over time. Zine makers submit their physical zines to QZAP, and collective members, usually librarians, archivists, scholars, and graduate students, scan the zines and create the metadata. Like zines themselves, QZAP is a DIY enterprise!
QZAP’s homepage features a rotation of different zine covers. This featured zine is about the representation of Black Lesbians in the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
QZAP allows users to browse zines, which is one of my favorite ways to explore their collections. With so much interesting and obscure content, browsing QZAP’s collection is a fun, serendipitous experience. QZAP also has an Advanced Search option for users to find zines by author, place of publication, or year of publication. I’ve used QZAP when working with Women’s & Gender Studies classes so students can see a broad set of queer zines over time. While the website’s look and feel are pretty simple and the technology is a bit dated, students respond enthusiastically to the content. I think QZAP’s simple design and stable technology have made it a sustainable project, especially because it is run by a volunteer collective independent of a university or institution.
Here’s a screenshot of a digitized zine and its metadata record in QZAP. I like that the metadata is so prominent next to the digital object.
One of my favorite things about QZAP is that it uses a specialized metadata schema just for zines called xZINECOREx, based on the more common DublinCore schema. Cataloging and describing zines are challenging. They often don’t have a title page with publication information. Sometimes no author or creator is listed, or the author goes by a pseudonym. Maybe they have a publication date, but often they do not.
A sample record using the xZINECOREx metadata schema.
Given these complexities, libraries and archives handle describing zines in all sorts of ways. The xZINECOREx schema provides a standard that can be used across institutions and by independent projects like QZAP. QZAP contributes metadata from its collection to the Zine Union Catalog, which aims to be a single place to search for zines across multiple libraries, archives, and independent collections. Because zines are ephemeral, this catalog is a great resource for scholars interested in the history of zines.
A digital collection like QZAP is vital to preserving the history of these rare, hard-to-find publications, yet there remains great value in studying physical zines. The physical objects provide the reader with a unique, tactile experience. This is especially important for LGBTQ+ history, which is so often erased or hidden. Reading a personal, first-hand account from a queer punk in the 90s – from the actual paper zine that person made by hand – is visceral and powerful. It’s an experience hard to replicate in an online setting. If you find QZAP intriguing, I encourage you to stop by our Zine Collection on the 5th floor of the Fine Arts Library. Our collection has many queer zines, including many published in Texas, and dates back to the 1990s.
Want to learn more about zines? Check out these resources:
“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.
I’m proud to wrap up the UT Libraries triptych of zine exhibits with Weird and Wonderful Little Books: An Abbreviated History of Chapbooks Published in Austin. My colleagues Daniel Arbino and Sydney Kilgore released their exhibits earlier this year, featuring selections from the zine collections from the Fine Arts Library and the Benson Latin American Collection. Zines have a reputation for being edgy and subversive and are associated with punk and anarchist politics. That reputation at first blush doesn’t seem to align with poetry, but poetry chapbooks and zines have an intertwined history. (See our blog post “Have You Zine It?” for further discussion of these intersections between chapbooks and zines.)
Chapbooks have a curious history. Some scholars argue that the term is a combination of “cheap books” and “chapmen.” (Chapmen were traveling salesmen who wandered England and Scotland with thin, paper-bound books throughout the early Modern era, circa 1500-1800.)[1] The current iteration of the American poetry chapbook is a distinctly 20th century phenomenon, linked to the technological advances of photocopying, desktop publication, and the internet. The UT Poetry Center in the Perry-Castañeda Library includes local poetry chapbooks from the last 40 years. My new online exhibit presents features this collection, with chapbooks from different small presses operating in Austin.
Cover of the poetry chapbook Night Diner: A Report to Edward Hopper by Albert Huffstickler. Cover art by Rob Lewis.
These little books play a profound role in poetry communities because they allow authors to share their work with their readers and fellow writers cheaply and easily. Writers can bypass the elitism and bureaucracy of boutique presses and mainstream publishing companies by self-publishing chapbooks or working with small local presses. These books, then, come with small price tags. Writers often only recoup their production costs, and some give their chapbooks away for free.[2]
This version
of a literary gift economy has been alive in Austin since the 1970s. Many
outsiders might assume that Austin’s art and culture begins and ends with live
music, but Central Texas has a vibrant literary culture, built by dedicated
writers and small press editors. This exhibit features chapbooks from the late
70s and early 80s that showcase Austin’s counter-culture and feminist voices,
while contemporary examples represent the diversity of writers in this growing
city, especially those from marginalized backgrounds.
By
highlighting the presses, their editors, and, of course, the writers, I hope to
bring to life and document Austin’s literary community. Emmalea Russo and
Michael Newton, poets and small press editors, argue that chapbooks create “a
space for makers to come together and look at each other’s work. So much of the
value of poetry is the community that comes out of it—both in terms of
relationships and as a way to discover new ideas. It means everything.” I hope
that you will find these selections by Austin writers represent a community
where poetry does, indeed, mean everything.[3]
Cover of the poetry chapbook The Queen’s Glory and the Pussy’s Box by Ebony Stewart. Cover art by RaShae L.A. Bell.
[1] Woodcock,
Diana Gwen. “The Poetry Chapbook: Blessing or Curse?” International Journal of the Book 8, no. 3 (2011): 27.
[3] “Emmalea
Russo and Michael Newton on Ugly Duckling Presse.” Poetry Society of America, n.d.
https://poetrysociety.org/features/q-a-chapbook-publishers/emmalea-russo-and-michael-newton-on-ugly-duckling-presse.
“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.
Zines are
do-it-yourself publications used by different cultural groups to share ideas
and information. The zine name and format emerged in the 1930s from fanzines
for the science fiction community. This same zine format – small circulation,
handmade, often photocopied– was used by activists to disseminate social and
political views in the 1960s. From the 1970s-1990s punk rockers and feminist
groups often adopted the zine format as a way to express their views within
their communities. During subsequent decades the appeal of zines has only grown
for makers and viewers alike. These light-to-hold pages of images and
text are cheap to produce and to purchase, even fun to trade. They have
never been more popular.
The Fine Arts Library began collecting zines in earnest in 2010 under the stewardship
of former Fine Arts Head Librarian Laura Schwartz. The reasonable cost of
zines made collecting possible and the FAL emphasis was given to zines that
related to art and music, as well as to local and regional zines. Schwartz also
cultivated relationships with local zine dealers, including Russell Etchen, the
owner of the former Austin bookstore Domy Books. When he moved from Austin,
Etchen generously gave a collection of 302 zines to the FAL.
Among the zines in the Russell Etchen Collection are many created by artists. These zine artists were
looking for a method to share work outside of traditional art world channels.
Their artwork expresses every stage of the artistic process from preliminary
sketches to carefully completed works of art. Although there are many themes
that could be explored in the diverse, still-to-be cataloged, Etchen
Collection, the exhibit, Art Zines From
the Russell Etchen Collection,
focuses on the contrasting ways in which six of these zine artists use the
compositional devices of page layout, collage, and color to create and communicate.
The exhibit will be of interest to any zine enthusiasts interested in
do-it-yourself culture, as well as to scholars, artists, designers and art
historians who can resource this distinctive zine collection for teaching and
creative inquiry.
This is the first of three Omeka
exhibits to focus on zines held in UT Collections. The zines for this exhibit
were chosen by former Humanities Liaison Librarian for Fine Arts, Rebecca Pad. Print
versions of these art zines from the Russell Etchen Collection are house in the
Fine Arts Library. Digitized copies of pages from
these art zines, as well as more of the Etchen art zines, are to be found on
Artstor under University of Texas – Art and Art History Visual
Resources Collection
Sydney Kilgore is Media Coordinator for the Visual Resources Collection, Fine Arts Library.
Friend of the University of Texas Libraries and Art History Professor Eddie Chambers has curated a collection of publications for a display in the reading room at the Fine Arts Library.
Chambers’ exhibit — “Recognizing the History of Black Magazine Publishing in the US” — features selections from his personal collection that represent the burgeoning of an independent press which spoke to the experience of African Americans in the late 20th Century, and includes examples from the period of the publications Ebony, Ebony Jr!, Jet, Black World, Negro Digest and Freedomways.
Eddie Chambers,
Professor, Art History: I have over the years collected, for research
purposes, various magazines and journals, going back a number of decades. These
magazines and journals have particular relevance to African American history,
culture, politics, identity, and so on. Some of these I’ve assembled for the
current FAL display. I am always attracted to vintage, archival items such as
these as they enable us to get a direct feel, not only of the graphics and
aesthetics of the times during which they were published, but in reading their
texts, we get a direct sense of arguments, reportage and opinions, again,
from the respective times.
As with so many things that carry an ‘African American’
prefix, we can perhaps trace the establishment of the Black press to a
reluctance by the white-dominated media to pay proper and respectful attention
to the agendas of African Americans. Magazines such as Ebony were
important for a wide range of reasons including the readership’s ability to
keep apprised of the ins and outs of Black celebrity lives, the ins and outs of
the struggle for civil rights, going back many a decade, and the ins and outs
of stories and issues that lay at the heart of African American existence. With
the spectacular growth of the internet, the publishing media is in general, in
various levels of retreat. This applies also to the Black press and the display
points to the ways in which magazines published weekly or monthly were such an
important and necessary means by which African Americans gleaned a wide range
of information. And in Ebony magazine, the adverts are as
entertaining as can be! It’s not hard for us to be inclined to the view that
contemporary issues are different from those people thought about and acted on
in decades gone by. Seeing magazines such as these, we might think, or realize,
that issues we are concerned with or interested in at the present time, go back
years, and decades.
Where are the materials from?
EC: I have collected the materials over the course of a number of years. Most of the material relates to some or other aspect of my research. For example, I recently acquired a copy of an Ebony issue that trailed on its front cover a feature on the quest for a Black Christ. Sourcing this came about because I am editing a volume – the Routledge Companion to African American Art History – which contains a text by a scholar, looking at visualizations of Christ and Christianity by African American artists. I wanted to double-check quotations by her, from this Ebony issue, in her essay. Material such as these magazines and journals are not frequently available to researchers and scholars, without considerable effort, so I find myself constantly sourcing such material. Having acquired items, I am always keen to share the material, which is why I periodically undertake displays such as this, in the Fine Arts Library (FAL). Right now, I have different archival material loaned out for exhibits that are currently on view at both the Blanton Museum and the Christian Green Gallery, here at UT Austin.
What do you see as the major impacts of the selected publications?
EC: The types of
materials on view represent some of the sources African Americans had to turn
to, in order to read stories that reflected themselves. Television was of
course very poor at offering anything that was not considered of primarily
mainstream (i.e. white) interest. Black publishing — and the adverts it carried
— offered a vital route through which African Americans could source hair care
products or, more generally, see adverts that featured people who looked like
them. The importance of this cannot be overstated.
These magazines were also an environment that stimulated and
gave work to Black journalists at a time when the mainstream media was
frequently reluctant to. Photographers, typesetters, journalists, sub editors,
layout artists, etc., all professionally benefitted from the Black press. We
might think that in the modern age, people’s attention spans might be somewhat
skewed or compressed, but the stories presented in some of these Black
magazines enabled substantial, engaged, complex stories to be told, as well as
the lives, loves, and ups and downs of Black celebrity life, to be digested. Of
course, a pocket-sized magazine such as Jet offered its
readers information in decidedly bite-sized chunks.
The perpetual, systemic framing of African Americans within
the white dominated media was one of them as being ‘problems’. African
Americans tended to realize that the framing of them as having problems
was but a short hop skip and jump away from them being problems.
The formidable perception, framed and maintained by the white controlled media,
of America having first, Negro, then Afro American, then African American problems was
more than enough to persuade African Americans of the need to maintain, for
their own sense of self, a Black press that respected the multi-dimensionality
of their selfhood. The Black press enabled African Americans to see themselves
not as cardboard cutout problems, but as complex human beings who existed in
the round.
Of course, it must be added that African Americans relied on
the Black press to carry nuanced, informed analyses of the problems they had. In
this sense, a profound manifestation of empathy existed between the Black press
and its clientele.
How did this era of the Black press influence the representation of African Americans in modern media?
EC: Modern media
is of course vastly different from publishing in decades gone by. One of the
biggest influences is perhaps the ways in which white-controlled media has
diversified, to an extent, its content. Quite rightly, we expect the New
Yorker, the New York Times, and a slew of other media to
carry stories that speak to the country’s diversity, including of course, that
of the African American demographic. Diversified media content has in its own
way perhaps worked to lessen the impact and importance of a distinctly African
American branch of publishing.
There is of course still huge amounts of work to be done,
but at the present time, the wholesale exclusion of African Americans from
mainstream media, as was the case in decades gone by, is arguably less of an
issue at the present time.
What costs approximately five dollars but can be considered rare ephemera in academic libraries? Zines, of course! We three (Daniel Arbino, Gina Bastone and Sydney Kilgore), who work with zines, hope to share our enthusiasm for the format in this quick overview, as well as three exhibitions during the coming year. In explaining the who, what, when, why, and where of zines on the UT Campus, we hope to capture your imagination and get you as excited about zines as we are.
What do zines actually look like? Think of the appearance of all the instruction pamphlets you have ever received that accompany all the objects you have ever bought, and you will get some idea of the many ways zines can look. And like these enclosed sets of instructions, zines are most often staple-bound pages of images and texts that are light to hold, easy to flip through, with subjects galore.
The OED states that zine is a shortened form of the word fanzine, a term coined by a group of ”makers” that created handmade publications for their fellow science fiction fans in the 1930s. This same zine format – small circulation, handmade, often self-published – was picked up as a way of publishing social and political views in the 1960s by activists, then in the 1970s-1990s by punk rock and feminist groups. During subsequent decades the number of people making zines has grown huge, with a resultant rise in the number of zine formats and subjects. Which brings us to the present and to thoughts the three of us have about zines and the zine collections housed in the UT Libraries’ Collections.
What is a zine?
Gina Bastone: My gut-response to this question is that a zine is a just photocopied, staple-bound booklet. Most are really that simple, but at the same time, this flexible format is a vessel for anyone – and I mean, literally anyone – to have a voice. That means zines can be as varied and diverse as their creators, which also makes them difficult to define and categorize. Zines don’t cost a lot to make, and they’re accessible, portable, and easy to share. For writers and artists, creating a zine provides a way (outside of mainstream publishing) to put creative work out into the world, and for activists, zines are an effective and low-cost way to spread important information and mobilize others.
Daniel Arbino: This is something that I’ve been trying to pin down for the last few years. In my estimation, a zine is a do-it-yourself publication that historically, has had a very small audience of family of friends. It can include art, photographs, poetry, short essays, or stories. I often think of those materials as highly personal, whether it is the creator’s reflection on their own life or a television show or music genre that they connect with on a deep level. Nowadays, zines can reach larger audiences through online purchasing on Etsy or through zine fests. However, the explosion of zines through these outlets has also made their identification murky for me. Sometimes a self-published graphic novel can look like a zine and vice versa.
Sydney Kilgore: I, like Daniel, have struggled with what defines a zine. Yes, there is the handmade aspect to them or their suggested small circulation number. Zine texts and images are also usually original to the artist. But zines can contain text and images appropriated by the artist as well. Pages in zines can be stapled together in the simplest way or can approach the artist book category in their complexity and beauty. Zines can be self-published or not. They are usually reasonable in price when initially bought, but, with time, can become rare and attain Special Collection status. In truth, I think the inability to easily define what zines are add to their mystique. People want to know about them, and interested, they go to zine fests, meet the artists, look in libraries and books stores and learn what can always be said about zines – they are limitless in their formats, subjects, and appeal.
“Exciting Places for Boring People” by Andy Rementer
What is your personal history with zines?
Sydney Kilgore: Zines escaped my notice until I started working in the UT Fine Arts Library (FAL) and learned of the Zine Collection that my boss, former FAL head librarian Laura Schwartz, was building. Her enthusiasm for zines was contagious. I recall one UT Library event, a Zine-A-Thon, Laura organized during which a group of PCL catalogers first explained the perils of cataloging zines – not easy to assign subject headings; numerous contributors with unclear roles; no listed publishers or publication dates; and so forth. Then we attendees attempted to crowdsource-catalog three zines of our choice from the amazingly diverse UTL collections of zines. We ran out of time to complete our cataloging, feeling some sympathy for our cataloguer colleagues. About a year later, armed with limited knowledge and inspired by Laura’s proselytizing, I headed for a conference in Seattle, where I bought my first zine from the famous Seattle bookstore, The Elliott Bay Book Company. I remember grinning as I left the bookstore. I was now one of the Zine initiates.
Gina Bastone: I first discovered zines in college, when friends of mine created staple-bound booklets to showcase their creative writing projects. Back then, it was just a fun thing a few friends did to circulate their writing to a small audience of peers. I didn’t really think much more of it, and I didn’t know anything about the history of zines in punk culture or the Riot Grrrl movement. When I was in my 20s, I learned more about those punk, feminist roots, and I contributed my own writing to more sophisticated art/poetry zine anthologies. I also started collecting poetry chapbooks at public readings. I’m fascinated by the connections and similarities between zines and chapbooks, and why some writers use one term over the other. The “chapbook” as a format has been around for hundreds of years and has its own interesting evolution. But at its heart, a chapbook is a lot like a zine – it’s a simple, low-cost mechanism for sharing creative work outside of mainstream publishing.
Daniel Arbino: I wish that I had my own zine growing up, but alas, I only discovered zines about three to four years ago. I was working on my MLIS at the time and living in New Orleans. For one of my course assignments, I went to the Amistad Research Center and used their zine collection. I was immediately struck by how unique each zine is. Whether it is by shape, size, format, or content, it seems that every zine carries a distinction. The fact that the zine is an outlet for historically marginalized groups captivated me most of all. I thought, here is a chance to incorporate voices that publishers are overlooking. When I started at the University of Texas at Austin, that sentiment contributed to my desire to advance the Benson Latin American Collection’s zine offerings.
“Bodily Memory” a poetry chapbook by Leticia Urieta
What is the University of Texas Libraries’ institutional history with zines?
Daniel Arbino: Speaking for the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, I can say that adding a zine collection was perhaps new in name, but not in practice. We are the official repository for the Puro Chingón Collective, who regularly publishes their own zine. Additionally, my colleagues and our predecessors at the Benson have collected a plethora of DIY and small press publications from across Latin America – Caribbean graphic novels, Brazilian cordeles, Argentine chapbooks, and cartoneras. Curating our zine collection to match these similar materials has been a project of mine for two years. In that time, I have purchased approximately 200 zines focusing on U.S. Latinx creators through zine fests in Austin, Albuquerque, San Antonio, and New York City as well as online acquisitions. In the Spring of 2019, I processed these zines as an archival collection that can be accessed in our Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room. The collection is a small, but noteworthy addition to UTL’s commitment to popular culture.
Sydney Kilgore: The Fine Arts Library’s Collection of zines began to grow in earnest in 2012 under the stewardship of former FAL head librarian Laura Schwartz. Laura, fascinated with zines, wanted to build a collection that could be shared with library patrons; the reasonable cost of zines making their collecting possible. She set her collecting parameters – art and music, and/or local and regional artists; and frequented Austin stores such as Domy Books, owned by zine collector Russell Etchen. This relationship later resulted in Etchen gifting his Zine Collection to the FAL. Laura also worked with knowledgeable library colleagues like Beth Kerr, former FAL Dance and Theater Librarian, and Katherine Strickland, PCL Maps Coordinator, who shared their knowledge and made their own additions to the FAL Zine Collections. Laura then made the decision that the zines be searchable in the library catalog and available for checkout. Former Arts and Humanities Liaison Librarian Becca Pad, equally enthused about zines, continued to make additions to the FAL Zine Collection; wrote a LibGuide for them; and helped head the UT Libraries’ participation in the immensely popular Lone Star Zine Festival. Thanks to Becca’s vision, there are now also plans for a new zine exhibition space on the 5th floor of the FAL which will focus interest on these unique collections.
Gina Bastone: When I started at UT in 2016, I knew about the Fine Arts Library’s zine collection, but I figured I wouldn’t work with it too much because I’m based at the Perry-Castañeda Library. However, I oversee the Poetry Center collection, which was founded in the 1965. I quickly learned that the Poetry Center has a wealth of poetry chapbooks, some published as far back as the 1950s. I found a chapbook published in the 70s by a Tejano activist-poet. It has cut-and-paste images interspersed with lines of poetry, and I thought “Is this a zine? Is it a chapbook? Is it somehow both?” And that’s the fun of the Poetry Center collection – it has these treasures, some of which are pretty rare, that document a history of creative writing in Texas entirely outside of mainstream publishing. I’m proud that the UT Libraries is able to preserve these little books and make them accessible to readers!
“Masa-mericanos” by Mercado Merch Art Collective
Over the next few months, we will be rolling out three different digital exhibits that highlight zines and chapbooks from UTL collections. In the meantime, be sure to visit our table at the 2019 Lone Star Zine Fest from 2-8pm on Sunday, September 1st at Northern-Southern Gallery on 1900 E. 12th St. We will be answering questions about zines, showing off a small sampling of our collections, and even handing out a zine that we made ourselves.
Being that he has a refined sense of both words and music, Whit seems like a good candidate for exploring and discovering some overlooked gems in the trove, and so in this occasional series, he’ll be presenting some of his noteworthy finds.
Haunted chamber pop-infused indie folk from Oakland’s Emily Jane White. Stark, autumnal, minor-key story songs stack up before the listener like sepia-toned family photos. White’s plucked guitar and sparse piano are formally backdropped by somber strings, cymbal swells, and pedal steel, but it’s in the bleak lyrics her eerie disembodied vocals deliver where each track’s true power lies.
On their self-titled debut, L.A.’s Eulogies mixes thematically heavy lyrics with reverb-drenched back alley indie pop. Coolly restrained with an economy of motion, not a single guitar lick, bass thump, or snare hit is wasted. The band beautifully broods with noir-inspired post-punk, allowing singer/songwriter Peter Walker’s world weary vocals plenty of room to stagger about in his serious moonlight.
NYC bassist/composer William Parker pushes the boundaries of free jazz and world music alike with this heady and cross-pollinated collection. Parker (solo artist, poet, painter, onetime sideman for Cecil Taylor) displays the deep cultural connections between West Africa and the New World by blending traditional instruments from both areas with gritty downtown avant-garde sax and upright bass. Ancient, modern, and astounding.
Berliner Nadja Korinth and New Yorker Ryan Schaefer meet somewhere in the jet-lagged middle on this mash-up of proto-punk fuzz, darkwave ambience, and krautrock minimalism. Drawing upon such art rock touchstones as VU, JMC, and Neu!, Palms defiantly never settles into a coherent sequence, preferring to bounce back and forth between styles in such a no-wave bliss that it keeps the unsuspecting listener peeking around the next corner for what’s next.
Linzay Young & Joel Savoy / Linzay Young & Joel Savoy
Old time Acadian music from Eunice, Louisiana’s Linzay Young and Joel Savoy. Like an update on Alan Lomax’s field recordings, Young (Red Stick Ramblers) and Savoy (founder of Valcour Records) captured these pre-accordion Cajun standards in just one afternoon with no frills and with no overdubs. Their vocal/fiddle/guitar dynamic rings true with front porch authenticity, and the twin fiddle tunes are simply enchanting.
[Harold Whit Williams is a Library Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources Cataloging for Content Management. He writes poetry, is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather, and releases lo-fi guitar-heavy indie pop as DAILY WORKER.]
Being that he has a refined sense of both words and music, Whit seems like a good candidate for exploring and discovering some overlooked gems in the trove, and so in this occasional series, he’ll be presenting some of his noteworthy finds.
This short-lived yet highly influential late 80’s D.C. area band strummed and shoegazed ahead of its time, foreshadowing the twee-pop genre. Fuzz, feedback, and post-punk drumming backfill the sugary-sweet AM radio vocals. Their complete recordings here, with six previously unreleased songs.
Mancunian folk singer-songwriter Nancy Elizabeth Cunliffe haunts in a most wonderful way on this spare, moody, and ethereal album, released on UK’s The Leaf Label. Ballasted by minor-key piano and acoustic guitar, her voice drifts out to sea, lilting with love and loss.
Long-time bassist for legendary McCoy Tyner (as well as giants Art Blakey and Archie Shepp), Sharpe stretches the trad jazz piano/bass/drums setting here into something completely unique, showcasing his virtuosic chops on sweet old standards and bold originals alike.
Wind-driven ballads from Ontario’s Dave McCann, backed by his roots-rocking band the Firehearts and produced by Nashville’s Americana icon Will Kimbrough. This collection sets out upon that long stretch of heartworn highway, but brings the listener closer to home with each bittersweet song.
Avant-garde jazz drummer Hooker, artist/composer/turntablist Marclay, and Sonic Youth guitarist Ranaldo anesthetize, improvise, and terrorize the more than willing crowd in this live recording from NYC’s Knitting Factory. Ambient musique concrète + furious drum flurries + dissonant guitar squawk = Exquisite Chaos.
William Hooker, Christian Marclay, Lee Ranaldo. Bouquet.
[Harold Whit Williams is a Library Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources Cataloging for Content Management. He also writes poetry, is guitarist for Cotton Mather, and records ambient electronic music under the solo name The French Riot.]
