Zine Trades!
So I’ve learned a lot in the past month or so since making my first ‘zine and mailing a bunch of copies all over the damn place. First and foremost, I learned how much postage is required to send a letter within the US, to Canada, Mexico, the UK, and the Philippines. Great first step.
More importantly, I’ve learned that the people behind the ‘zine culture are awesome – they create interesting content, but more importantly – they want to share it (often times not for a profit). Enter TRADES. To me, this is what it’s all about.
When I printed off 60 copies of mark’s demise volume 1, I looked at this stack of photocopied/stapled booklets and thought to myself “now what”? After some sporadic googling I was fortunate enough to find a few websites that facilitated zine-communication (most notably http://wemakezines.ning.com/). Honestly, my first response was “oh wow, there aren’t many members on this site that are still active…”. But I posted anyways, and sent a few messages…to my surprise, there were actually quite a few people interested in trading.
So I spent an afternoon stuffing envelopes and writing addresses…it all felt kind of zen, and I loved the physicality of the whole process – so much more tangible than a blog. I put handwritten notes in a bunch of them, and photocopied “thanks for the trade” notes in the rest (lesson learned: It’s better to ALWAYS include a handwritten note…every time I got one it totally made my day).
I think that’s the appeal of zines (for me) in 2016…in an age where everything is online and pixelated, where people are snapping/insta-chatting dozens of times a day with shortening attention spans…for someone to take the time to actually curate a body of work to print instead of just puking it onto the interwebs shows that we are still capable of taking a thoughtful approach towards sharing what is important to us, instead of just letting the internet decide.
(yes, I get the irony that this is a blog post.)
Ok long story long, the point of this post is to share some cool shit I got in the mail from cool people. Clearly these aren’t “reviews” (if you’re interested in that: http://syndicatedzinereviews.blogspot.ca/), but I wanted to take a few pics of things that stood out to me.
Most importantly, I really enjoyed getting the handwritten notes from the zinesters I was trading with…writing letters is a a lost art! Hopefully we can continue trade, and I can get to know all of them a bit better through their work and words.
Now off to make issue #2!
Pantano
July 26, 2016 @ 5:06 pm
So much rad!!