zine (chapbook?) racks at Quimby's in Chicago

You don’t know, but it seems like everybody else does, so you don’t want to ask coz you’re afraid you’ll look like a jerk. It’s cool, we won’t tell anybody. Most of us probably don’t know either, and are just acting like we do…

Everybody kind of knows what a zine is: a little self-”published” booklet, often photocopied on 8 1/2 x 11″ paper, folded in half, and stapled, although there are lots tiny tiny zines, and bigger ones the size of a typical glossy magazine are pretty common, too. When you walk into a bookstore, though, the difference between what we think of as “zine” and what is actually displayed on the “chapbook” rack isn’t so apparent, as most chapbooks available today also fit this description…

A perfunctory online search doesn’t help much, either, mostly turning up info about the chapbook in its original form, inexpensive pocket-sized booklets popular from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries–the cheap pop paperbacks of the pre-cheap-pop-paperback era.

The answer after the jump… maybe

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Chicago Underground Library Reader Interviews: Quimby’s Bookstore Part #2

Chicago Underground Library loves writers and publishers, but they (and we) wouldn’t exist without readers. Over the next few months, we’ll be posting interviews with Chicagoans about their favorite gone-but-not-forgotten publications, under-recognized writers, and what it takes to make a book quintessentially Chicago. (Hint: It’s not spilling deep dish pizza on it.)

Liz Mason, manager of Quimby’s for 9 years, takes us behind the scenes into Quimby’s archives. Next time you are there, ask to see Steven Svymbersky’s dirty alphabet submission for Lumpen (Vol. 5, No. 10). Or pop by the Chicago Underground Library as we do carry many older issues of Lumpen.

Trivia question #1: Who designed Quimby’s logo?

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Since 2003, Chicago’s Blank Line Collective has been dedicated to producing living, breathing theater through non-traditional approaches and methods, often drawing  inspiration from other (often non-traditional themselves) art forms. For their newest production, Blank Line has drawn from one of the most beloved non-traditional art forms around: the zine! Likes/Dislikes, a two-woman performance exploring some of the ways the mind may work with and against itself, is based on a zine of the same name chosen from the Chicago Underground Library’s own zine racks.

Check out the details of Blank Line’s performance…

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“This is like DIY organizing.”

Ramsey Beyer is not just alluding to the do-it-yourself participants taking part in the Chicago Zine Fest, but also directly referring to the learning curve of the Chicago Zine Fest organizers. The transformation from mere attendees of zine fests only a few months ago to savvy organizers of Chicago’s first official festival of zine culture…it’s quite an impressive story.

The idea was originally planted into their collective brain on a drive back from the Milwaukee Zine Fest last November. Ramsey, Neil Brideau, Matt Czerwinski and Leslie Perrine, having attended and tabled at many zine fests around the country, wondered why there was no zine festival in Chicago, a natural hub for zine culture with its book industry and humming self-publishing community.

In true, DIY fashion, what started out as a question of why became a question of when and the how was answered with their conviction that they were the who to do it. They plunged into the project head-first.

“Let’s go big!” was the unanimous decision.

“We have all been involved in planning events in some way.” says Leslie. She and Matt are the organizers of the Funhouse Collective. For a Funhouse event, they put together a casual “Chicago Zine Fair” which incorporated a reading and a zine swap. Bringing together Ramsey’s art connections and the contacts that Neil has through Quimby’s, the four friends were the natural choice to organize the first ever Chicago Zine Fest.

But still, there is that learning curve.

“We definitely learned a lot.” concedes Ramsey and she recalled her conversation with one of their mentors from the Portland Zine Symposium and their perplexity at the idea of this strange thing called a “press kit”.

“This place is asking for a press kit…why would we want to have a press kit?” And what goes inside a “press kit” anyways, everybody wondered at the time?

Matt confessed, “Originally, I thought it was like just asking people to come.” seeing how word-of-mouth seemed to work before with previous events that they organized.

Ramsey and friends are now much wiser in the ways of working their publicity machine. “Now we have done so many other forms and letters and packets…I had no idea.”

And they must have been doing something right. Not only do they have quite a list of sponsors (Quimby’s Bookstore, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Renegade Handmade, Columbia College), the response from the public has been positively inspirational. People are flying in from Canada and the various corners of the U.S. just to attend the 2-day festival.

The program of events is as follows:

Ramsey points out, “There’s not one portion [of the program] that has seen less excitement, which is really cool.” The response was overwhelming and submissions for participation flooded in. When it came time to select the participants for the readings on Friday, they tossed the names in a hat and randomly chose their panel of readers.

“We were really excited about the names that we picked and we were pretty sad about the names that we didn’t pick.” Neil said, expressing the group’s elation in the selected names and simultaneous disappointment in not having been able to include everybody.

They came up with a good mix of local and non-local, and different forms of work. They even have some well-known figures such as Anne Elizabeth Moore, John Porcellino and the afore-mentioned Jeffrey Brown.

The most palpable element that you sense about the friends is the fun that they have in each other’s company. As Eric set them up for their photo shoot, the banter and ease in acting silly with each other gave me the feeling that they truly enjoy what they are doing and that this is not work.

“No way!” Neil’s friends would exclaim when he casually dropped that their meetings can be three hours or more. “It doesn’t feel like it’s that long.” According to him, the Chicago Zine Fest group has “some of the least painful meetings I’ve ever been to.”

They appear to have this natural symbiotic relationship, whereby each person picks up whatever needs to be done, no need for further words of admonishment. “It’s just nice to know that when we divide up tasks, we seem to have some sort of faith and trust in each other that things will get done.” says Matt. This intrinsic belief in each other’s ability and strength extends to their belief in the validity of all of zine culture, independent publishers and DIYers alike.

Leslie sums up the group’s feeling about the importance of having that place where everyone can feel that they belong. “We’re trying to have a space that people feel welcome in and hang out in and support a community of people that we feel strongly is worth supporting.”

And despite having little experience or previous know-how in the process of creating a festival, they have put together an impressive program of events. Asked about how the dynamics of this group has worked so fluidly whereas others have collapsed into a sorry heap of just a few disgruntled individuals shouldering the burden, Neil states that it’s due to the group’s absolute enthusiasm for the whole zine culture and what it fosters.

“I make my mini-comics because I want to make my mini-comics.” For Neil, there is no monetary gain.

Matt adds, “It’s unmediated, unfiltered content…It’s something that you can just carry around with you and give out to people and it’s part of yourself and whatever your creative vision is.”

The organizers have this strong sense of the intrinsic value of the personal and how that fits within the community, and they want to make sure that everyone is a part of that process of bringing about their own “creative vision”. They already have plans to hold a meeting after CZF 2010 for discussions on what they want to do for CZF 2011. And key to that is to bring in as many people as possible into that process.

Matt and the others are looking forwards to the actual days of the event. Just a few short months after that car ride back from Milwaukee, they have achieved their goal of bringing together the community for a celebration of zine culture, art and DIY ingenuity.

“It’s amazing what people can do when they are given free reign to something…Some of the ideas that we are getting from people are pretty awesome…That’s one aspect that’s really exciting, that we are opening it up to people like that.”

Chicago Zine Fest email: chicagozinefest@gmail.com

-  Thùy and Eric interviewed the CZF crew on February 17, 2010. Eric arranged their poses and took the photos. Thùy assembled their words for this blog post. We are proud to carry their works at the Chicago Underground Library.

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I recently spoke to my friend Colin Horgan about the CUL for a True/Slant article he was writing, and the conversation turned, as conversations often do, to the practical and metaphysical questions raised by the differences between online and print media.

Specifically, what happens to literature as part of an ever-changing community landscape when it becomes, via the web, geographically non-specific? How does this affect an organization like the CUL, whose mission is “to map the evolution (historically and contemporaneously) of Chicago’s communities and movements and encourage the production of new media by providing context, inspiration, and programming designed to support collaboration?” The internet provides a convenient, free-or-cheap alternative to zine making, book making, and small-press printing in the form of blogging. The blog or website format offers not only a more economical, environmentally-friendly, and widely-distributed option for publications which, in the pre- or proto-internet era, would have naturally utilized the print medium, but also some other features as well: with blogging, there’s very little time commitment required. You don’t have to think about layout, format, how you’re going to duplicate and distribute your product–you just type whatever you want in the box, and hit “publish!”

As a result, there are jillions of bloggers globally disseminating their thoughts on any and everything who would never have bothered with print, some with and some without connections to literary and cultural communities in their region. It seems to me, at least, that now, with print no longer the default method for information dissemination, a person or group that chooses the print medium often does so consciously, choosing it over the benefits of the online medium for very specific reasons. Of course, the tactile experience of holding something as you read it is most often cited, but there are tons of other practical and aesthetic reasons. If you specifically want to reach a small, location-specific population of readers–bike riders in the Logan Square area, for example–it makes sense to print a very small run and make it available at the places where that population goes every day–bike shops; cafes, stores, and bars in Logan Square that always have a bunch of bikes out front.

In my conversation with Colin, I wondered if, specifically regarding zine-making versus blogging, the decision to publish in print might hinge on connections with visual art, in which the process of creating an object and the object’s orientation to its viewer and environment are essential elements in its total content. For this reason, I don’t think people will ever stop producing independent publications, but what’s represented in them has changed A LOT because of these new questions. If you don’t need a physical object to represent any part of your content, well, then, you’re probably going to be blogging and not book-making…. but then….

If the reasons to print are changing, how accurate of a picture are we getting of location-specific identities, culture, and communities from what’s still being printed? How do libraries, both independent and institutional, approach the systematic archiving of material that is ephemeral by nature? And most importantly, how are all people as consumers of information affected as the question of information dissemination becomes more and more metaphysical?

The “Death of Print” subject has been and continues to be discussed, examined, debated, deconstructed, reconstructed, and otherwise addressed in many different ways by many different people in many different places.  Our conversation here, like the topic itself, is already venturing into “meta” territory,  carried out as it is on the online blog of a community organization that archives geographically-specific independent and small press paper media. This series will highlight some of the ways people have responded to the question across different disciplines.

–MEREDITH

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My books are split between two categories:

1. Comics & comics-related books
2. Everything else

Though a third category is starting to develop - a healthy collection of zines! -  I would like to show you my comics.

I’m in the process of cataloging them all on librarything.com and have them tagged into four main categories:

Minicomics - usually photocopied and hand-bound comics smaller than a Letter-sized sheet of paper.
Graphic Novels - you know, those big fat volumes, that people think make comics a legitimate form of literature.
Trade Paper Backs (of TPB) - soft cover comics, usually not as voluminous as a graphic novel, often collecting individual comic book issues into a single story arch.
Comic Book - aka, a “floppy” it’s the traditional comic book you pick up from a spinner rack.

Other major tags include:

Anthology - collection of comics by various artists
Collection - collection of comics by a single artist or team that doesn’t have a main story arch running through each story.

My bedroom, though cold and too big for my liking, has built-in bookshelves which is pretty awesome. I decided this would be the best place for my comics collection.  Here are some pictures:

This is a full view of my comics. The shelf also holds paper for my own comic-making (top shelf), gewgaw (middle shelf), and random detritus floating around the shelves.  My comics are organized alphabetically by author.  It used to be organized by size, due to previous shelf restrictions (my non-comic books live on the wooden bookshelf that used to house my comics).  Because so many of my comics are self-published, they’re often very different sizes, ranging anywhere from 1/4″ x 1/4″ to 11 x 17.”  Organizing by size makes the row physically more stable, as large books aren’t leaning over small books, but it makes finding items difficult, unless you remember what size the comic was.  As you can see the top shelf is in complete disarray, but that’s my A-J shelf which I’m almost done cataloging.

Here’s my K-Q shelf. Along with a mug of water, and some chocolate.  Ugh, how embarrassing.

My R-Z shelf also houses my anthologies section.  My Anthologies are alphabetized by title, this way, anthologies with multiple volumes (like Papercutter, or Awesome) can stay together regardless of primary author or editor.

Finally, my to-read row, which includes mostly comics, but also zines, as well as prose & poetry books.

Neil Brideau is a CUL volunteer, makes comics, and works at Quimby’s Bookstore. He and his friends are organizing the first ever Chicago Zine Fest, March 12-13, 2010. You can attend the open planning meeting on January 30th, 11:30 a.m., at the Logan Square Library, 3030 W Fullerton Ave., a short walk from either the Blue Line Logan Square station or California station.

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While cataloging zines at the library recently, I ran across a small book called Ancient Egypt in the Year 4 Billion, a collection of three short stories,  vignettes of the distant future evoked much more lyrically than what we may have become accustomed to in popular science fiction.

The first, while pinpointing a very specific juncture in time in its title, The Four Infinities of June 12th, 200 & 6, seems to center thematically around the infinite; in particular, the inifinite as it is manifested within each individual, and what it means for two infinities to encounter one another.

The third, an excerpt from a work entitled The Dust Dunes of Old Earth, seems to draw on “traditional” sci fi to describe the descent of an explorer (archaeological, or geological, perhaps?) who has been fired deep into the heart of a dune, protected by a unique type of one-man vessel.

The second story in the collection, and also the longest, describes two people adrift on a giant animal’s ribcage after a Rapture- or Apocalypse-like event has left the Earth unpopulated and landless.  From Ship of Bone:

Click here to read interview and excerpt

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Bottlecap Table, from Junk Drawer's Find of the Week online

The stacks at the Chicago Underground Library house a wide variety of small press and independent publications, among which is an ever-growing collection of zines. Zine writer and CUL volunteer Eric Bartholomew recently shared some thoughts on zine culture with Diatribe Media:

Read on about zine culture!

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