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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 23 (2016)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 23

(2016)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Elisa Nelissen
The persistence of paper
Zines in the digital age

In the first half of 2014, a mobile library in the form of an old van toured across the European continent, stopping in 30 countries and 46 cities. Manned by three passionate youngsters from France, the library carried a collection of hundreds of independent zines: small, low-cost and usually self-published publications featuring the work of one of more photographers. The attention to material, design and format in these booklets suggest that they were made for the love of the craft and the object, rather than for profit. With its mobile library, the French organisation Zines of the Zone aimed (and still aims) to ‘create a European network and generate a public and mobile archive out of these alternative practises [of zine publishing]’.1 To realise this goal, they were supported by a grant from the European Commission, as well as two regional French grants. Wherever the travelling library stopped, the team collaborated with local cultural organisations in setting up pop-up exhibitions or events that celebrated and promoted their growing collection. To date, Zines of the Zone's archive holds over 1000 volumes, and continues to receive submissions. That a small team like theirs could gather such a large amount of publications, establish such a wide network, and receive the financial support of a prominent European institution is remarkable - especially given the relative obscurity of these publications and their absence from traditional publishing and distribution channels. It is the most visible proof of an evolution that has been going on for years among artists across the European continent and around the globe.

‘But what are they?’ The zine even puzzles media professor Stephen Duncombe, who opens his Notes from underground: Zines and the politics of alternative culture by saying that the best way to explain the medium is to hand over a stack of zines to the questioner.2 His book is one of the few scholarly investigations into the medium and is often cited in research papers on the subject. The term ‘zine’ appears to circulate only among a small group of often - though definitely not exclusively - young artists and creatives, who see the medium as a means to easily, cheaply and quickly get their thoughts and art out in the world.



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Figure 1. The online archive of Zines of the Zone


Duncombe defines the zine as ‘noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves’.3 Generally speaking, zines are usually handmade, using whatever printing and binding techniques are available to the zinester, as zine publishers are called in the scene. Their content extends as far as the self-publisher's imagination, and, as a result, zines have been made on the most generic and most obscure of subjects. Zines can be published as oneoffs or in a series (though these are often highly irregular), and circulate among networks of likeminded people, sold for very little money or traded for other zines. As a result, they are uncensored, lo-fi testaments from alternative groups that might otherwise have remained undocumented. These characteristics distinguish zines from other, more traditional publication channels, as one could not publish about any subject in a commercial magazine, and these media certainly do have to make a profit. Despite being highly individual in style and content, zines are embedded in an extensive history of independent, alternative, and, at times, radical publishing that started long before the first zines were published.

The photography zines, like those in the collection of Zines of the Zone, started to appear a decade or so ago. They are the latest addition to a long line of publications dubbed ‘zines’, of which the origin can be traced back to the first half of the twentient century. One could argue that throughout their history, zines have always been the result of the need within a certain community to speak freely about those things its members were passionate about. This paper will seek to contextualise contemporary art

zines such as those in the collection of Zines of the Zone, embedding them in the broad history of zine publishing that started almost a century ago. Tying together previous research into zines and zine culture, it will investigate how these publications have evolved along with the communities that published them and new consumer technologies that became available, and offer a possible explanation to why the medium is still popular in the digital age. Four periods in zine history will be discussed: the origins of zines during the heydays of science-fiction writing in the first half of the twentieth century, the rise of music zines and the birth of diy in the 1970s and 80s, the widespread popularity of all sorts of zine genres among youths during the 90s and, finally, their revival in a more artistic format in the 21th century. For each of these periods, the Dutch-Belgian context will be highlighted.

Before delving into the history of zines, it is important to highlight the sources used in this article. Zine culture has been discussed in a fairly limited number of scholarly works. Moreover, the geographical focus of zine collecting and studying seems to lie in the United States (where the first zine appeared) and the United Kingdom (where the punk subculture in particular contributed strongly to the popularity of the medium). It is unclear whether this is because of a lack of zine publishing activity in other countries, because there happens to be more interest in zine culture in Anglo-Saxon countries, or simply because of convenience. Regardless, it is likely that this academic interest contributed to the rise in libraries that collect zines in these countries - or vice versa. This will be touched upon later in this essay.4 The first researcher to write about zines was Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist who was known for his fierce criticism of comic books and their influence on children's behaviour. Late in his career, he wrote The world of fanzines: A special form of communication (1973), in which he acknowledges the creativity of these subcultural forms of communication and expression, but the book was not received well by zinesters and has since become dated.5 The next notable scholarly investigation of zines and zine culture came 25 years later from Stephen Duncombe, mentioned earlier. Up until today, his book is widely cited in zine research. Other research into the subject is generally limited to the study of zines in various subcultures and social groups, most prominently punk, feminist and lgbt zines. Media professor Chris Atton discusses the relationship between zines and identity in his study Alternative media.6 Teal Triggs, graphic design professor, studied the graphic language of zines, most notably in her 2010 book Fanzines: The DIY revolution.7 Finally, former zine writer Amy Spencer links

zines to the indie music scene in DIY: The rise of lo-fi culture.8 In the Netherlands, the few works that appeared on the subject mostly list zines, without going into detail about their cultural or book-historical context. Artist Tjebbe van Tijen notes this lack of sources in his overview of magazines made by youths in the Netherlands between 1945 and 1990. Like others before him, van Tijen provides an overview of titles, among which a number of punk fanzines, but most of the magazines included were much more widespread and less individual than the zines discussed in this article.9

From fanzine to zine

Nearly a century ago, during the 1920s, magazines focusing on niche topics started to appear on newsstands in the United States - a direct result of the rise of capitalism and the adjoining consumer culture.10 One of these subjects was a new literary genre that soon became wildly popular: science fiction. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback, who had immigrated to the United States from Luxembourg and who is credited with coining the term ‘science fiction’, started publishing Amazing stories, today recognised as the world's first science fiction magazine. The magazine had a feature that would directly contribute to the birth of a network of fans, and to the birth of the first (fan)zines.11 The back of each issue contained a section for letters submitted by its readers, which were printed alongside their addresses to enable further correspondence. Readers who had become passionate about this new genre in fiction often submitted long commentaries and stories. Since these letters could not always be published - due to either their length or contents, fans would bypass Amazing stories, and instead wrote directly to each other. Consequently, a network of fans developed and was later formalised in the Science Correspondence Club (scc), with many similar clubs following suit.12

Writing letters to different people was time-consuming, so the availability of a fan network (and the contact details of its members) made it possible for fans to shift from one-on-one letters to duplicated booklets featuring various stories and commentaries. In 1930, the scc published The Comet, the first of such publications, which is now generally recognised as the first ever fanzine.13 The ‘lo-fi’ booklet consisted of ten sheets of paper held together with a paperclip, printed in typescript and decorated with hand drawn images, as can be seen in Figure 2. Its contents reveal some foundational elements of fan culture and fanzines: next to passionate essays and amateur stories, the editors also requested in the zine that those not interested in paying ($3 for the year 1930) and

being an active part of the community should immediately revoke their membership.14 While they strove to foster an active community that exchanged stories and discussions, The Comet15 also struggled to keep its fanzine economically viable.16



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Figure 2. The first issue of The Comet, the first ever fanzine, published in May 1930


Fanzine editors generally used the cheapest production tools available to them. So-called master zines, or originals, were duplicated by making carbon copies or by using mimeograph machines, spirit duplicators, or hectographs.17 After duplication, the copied pages would be collated and bound, something that was usually achieved with staples. Nonetheless, making fanzines took time and effort. In a detailed essay on zines and technology, zine contributor K.S. Langley mentions that the time between the first call for contributions and the actual production could easily span one to two years, with ‘speedy zines’ taking from six months to a year to produce.18 Science fiction fanzines

were often distributed through fan club networks. In the case of independent zines (zines made by an individual rather than a fan organisation) copies could only be obtained by writing directly to the editor(s), who often had ‘a fairly idiosyncratic approach to who [received] copies, with some fanzines not for sale and some for exchange only’.19

In an essay on fandom in Flanders and the Netherlands, Dutch science fiction writer Jaap Boekestein notes that science fiction fandom has always focused heavily on English- speaking countries.20 Boekestein notes Alpha as being the first (notable) fanzine in Flanders and the Netherlands. The zine was published in the 1950s by two editors of the Antwerp Science Fiction Fan Club who had been inspired by likeminded people in the United Kingdom. As a result, the zine was initially published in both English and Dutch, and eventually only in English, possibly to reach a wider audience, which was also more familiar with buying and reading various zines.21

As science fiction fanzines became more widespread in the 1950s and 60s, people were inspired to create zines about other interests, such as comics and cartoons, music - and ultimately any topic imaginable. ‘Consequently,’ notes zinester and zine researcher Fred Wright, ‘the fanzines produced outside of fantasy/science-fiction fandom became much less fan publications, and much more of a mongrel breed of publication all their own.’22 It is in this transition that the zine lost its purely ‘fan’ aspect, and both Wright and Atton use the term ‘zines’ for these, more all-encompassing, publications.23 Unlike fanzines, zines were no longer focused on appropriating cultural consumption, but rather ‘investigated the lived relationship of the individual zine writer to the world’.24 In other words, in and through zines, editors found a way to express and develop their personal views. This is particularly noticeable in feminist zines from the 1990s, which will be discussed later.

Music zines and the birth of DIY

The second wave of (fan)zine popularity came about in the 1970s with the rise of punk music and its accompanying lifestyle. Punk offered youths, disillusioned by the political climate of the time, ‘a chance to establish some sense of control over their own lives’, Spencer notes.25 This sentiment resulted in the birth of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (diy), a notion and mentality central to punk (which later became a popular concept far outside this niche). For Duncombe, ‘doing it yourself is at once a critique of the dominant mode of

passive consumer culture and something far more important: the active creation of an alternative culture’.26 Creating independent punk labels and fanzines allowed punks to promote a new and radically different music genre that mainstream media outlets did not (want to) cover. Punk zines mostly circulated within the scene and were distributed at concerts and in alternative record stores.27 Like science-fiction fanzines, they often featured readers' letters, enabling discussion and reflection, and as such, Triggs states, they became ‘vehicles of subcultural communication’ with an important role in building the punk identity and community.28

To match their radical ideas, a new visual aesthetic was developed, inspired by the individualistic and rebellious undertone in punk music. Triggs describes this as following:

When punk arrived in the uk, a politics of resistance translated into a subcultural graphic language manifest in the use of ‘threatening’ ransom note lettering, anarchist symbols, underpinned by an intentionally ‘shocking’ and aggressive use of swear word and slogans, intentional misspellings and incorrect use of punctuation.29

The graphic design was marked by handwritten texts and cut-and-paste letters and images. Combined with the cutting-edge concert reviews that would not be covered in mainstream media, punk zines evoked a strong aura of immediacy.30 New technologies had made it possible to publish zines much faster than during the days of science fiction fanzines: in the mid-1970s, offset lithography became available to the general public, moving the printing process out of the hands of zinemakers, as offset printing was mostly done by professional print shops.31 Such shops were easier to find than mimeograph machines, which often had to be borrowed from local churches or libraries. However, since offset had to be done professionally, it was also often more expensive.

With mimeography, any artwork had to be hand drawn on the original, master zine. Offset made it possible to easily reproduce other imagery, often from mainstream media. This practice became central to zinemaking during this period, and the appropriation of imagery, often with a satirical or ironic undertone, was a widespread practice in the punk age. It gained further popularity as consumer photocopiers became more affordable.32

The graphic material in some zines, in combination with blatant copyright violations, posed some problems for zine writers who wanted their work printed professionally. As one writer testifies:

Once I finished T'hy'la #1, I needed to get the zine in print and that would require finding a new printer. If I took T'hy'la to the printer I'd been using for my genzine,33 he'd have a heart attack... It was, I admit, a bit difficult to go in there for the first time. I was a bit...embarrassed. After all, I was asking them to print explicit art of naked men doing sexual things with each other.34

One notable zine from this period was the British Sniffin' Glue, of which a cover can be seen in figure 3. Sniffin' Glue (1976-1977) was, like many zines, a one-man effort, created by Mark Perry, who was perhaps the first to discuss the changing atmosphere among British youths in print. Perry encouraged his readers to follow his example and take matters into their own hands by writing: ‘All you kids out there who read “sg” don't be satisfied with what we write. Go out and start your own fanzines.’35 Perry's message caught on, and punk fanzines were quickly exported to other countries. In her book on punk in the Netherlands, Leonor Jonker notes how one punk, Kristian Kanstadt, took an issue of Sniffin' Glue back from a visit to London. Together with his friend Hugo Kaagman, he started Koekrant.36 One fanzine led to another, and eventually a nation-wide network ensured that the geographically scattered punk fans could stay up to date about Dutch punk bands.37

Fanzines did not just thrive in the underground, as underground culture was quickly converted into a trend by the mechanisms of capitalist society. ‘Like punk itself, fanzines moved from positions of independence to rapid co-option into the mainstream,’ Triggs notes.38 Its aesthetics were adopted by various fashion houses, magazines and musicians, and for many, punk was over as quickly as it began.39 Below the surface, however, the punk mentality continued (and continues) to live on in various other music genres and subcultures. Punk turned diy into a lifestyle and showed that anyone who wanted could get their word out, unfettered and uncensored.

Factsheet Five and the zine boom

The number of zines published started to grow exponentially in the 1980s, a decade characterised by the reinvention of the free market, as promoted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. As Triggs explains: ‘along with this new financial liberation came the concept of selling a lifestyle’, with the result that ‘consumption became cultural

practice’.40 The consumer photocopier was introduced, ‘[opening] up a new avenue for cheap, quick reproduction; it was fast, clean and mostly reliable’, Atton notes.41 Moreover, the production process could return to the full direction of the editor, if he had access to a self-service photocopy machine at home, a local library or at work. Next to the spread of photocopiers, two other factors contributed greatly to the rise in zine publishing during this time. The foundation of a periodical that promoted zine culture by publishing bibliographical details about all zines submitted to its editor, and the addition of a whole demographic to zine publishing: girls.



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Figure 3. Sniffin' Glue, issue 3 (1976)


As more and more zines were circulating among networks of youths, the need grew for some sort of organisation. This was provided by Mike Gunderloy, a fan of all zines alike, who started Factsheet Five, a so-called ‘metazine’ that catalogued and reviewed other zines. Gunderloy included every zine that was sent to him, without curation. People would buy the publication to find out about which zines were made, and as more people became aware of Factsheet Five, more people started to submit their zines for inclusion on the one hand, and create their own zines on the other. Eventually, Gunderloy's (physical) mailbox became inundated with submissions. ‘You'd have to see it to believe it. It was as if Mike were a one-man Google back in the 1980s,’ one writer commented.42 Each issue featured thousands of zines on all sorts of niche topics, as shown by the following two reviews.

the new settler interview #53 (75c from po Box 730, Willits, ca 95490): The lead article in this alternative agricultural lifestyle zine is on a fellow who uses bacteria from horse-manure to compost toxic waste. Then, there's a feature on a couple who raise Maples. Loaded with scientific and practical detail, along with ecocentric verse and fiction, this is, as regards its specialised topics, a very superior product. (t-56t/jr)
news of the weird #3-4 ($8/7 issues from Chuck Shepherd, po Box S7141, Washington, dc 20037): More fun and frolics from the nation's foremost collector of strange clippings. #3 includes stories (all true) of deranged church maintenance men, a candidate listing his occupation as ‘alleged white-collar racketeer’, and thousands of flying condoms, among other things. (s-4t/mg)43

Gunderloy eventually became so overwhelmed that he quit and sold his zine in 1991, after which it became a commercial enterprise, with a print run of 16.000 in 1998, the magazine's final year.



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Figure 4. Factsheet Five issue 20 (1991)


Zine publishing reached yet another niche audience in the late 80s, when a group of female punk members had grown unhappy with the position of women in the punk scene. They crystallised these sentiments in riot grrrl, a movement founded in 1991 in Washington, D.C. that was inspired by the punk ideology and third-wave feminism. Zines became central to the group's communication, empowering young women and giving them the tools for their own cultural production. Thousands of young women started to write about their own thoughts, feelings and interests, and zines from this time document the struggles of transsexuals and lgbt people. In the words of Duncombe, they were ‘a network of young women linked by zines, bands, and their anger’.44 Feminist zines continue to be published today, though many feminists have also found their way to online channels.

Zinesters during this time continued to document emerging underground music genres like post-punk, rave, and grunge. At the same time, a number of new zine topics became popular: personal zines, thrift zines, zines that commented on the conservative administration and increasingly invasive capitalism, but also, paradoxically, fashion and consumer zines. Commercial enterprises had discovered the spending power of this group of alternative youths, capitalising on them by publishing zines as part of their marketing campaigns.45 This in turn stimulated the popularity of creating zines.

Remarkably, no sources appear to discuss Dutch or Flemish zines from this period of high zine activity, though it is probable that there are many archives, public and - perhaps more likely - private, that would offer a plethora of source material for research into personal, feminist, queer and other zine publishing in the 1980s to late 1990s.

Zines in the twenty-first century

The immense popularity of zines stagnated with the introduction of a new platform for publication that was entirely new and inherently different from printed paper: the World Wide Web. First, there were electronic bulletin boards and e-mail, later blogs and social media, all allowing people to exchange ideas, thoughts, or creations quickly and cheaply, regardless of their location. As a result, in being an open platform for (relatively) free discussion and expression, online communication channels have taken over a number of essential characteristics of zines. As quoted on an online fan platform: ‘in the absence of any other solid medium, print fanzines are a record of what everyday people around the world were thinking and discussing before the Internet.’46 Important differences, however, are the incredible speed of communication, fairly low cost, and the fact that online, the so-called long tail of the Internet has made it easier than ever to find people with similar interests, regardless of how niche their tastes.47

In the early days of the Internet, these innovations caused many zine publishers to move their zines to the digital realm, calling them e-zines. Even though a group of dedicated zine publishers stayed true to the paper format, the boom of the late 1980s and early 90s had surely passed. This can perhaps explain why the first years of the new millennium are surprisingly undocumented in zine history. But zines did not disappear. In 2008, Duncombe published a new edition of his study on zines with a new (albeit brief) chapter titled ‘Do zines still matter?’, in which he observes that:

More than a decade later [after first publishing his book], zines are still being published and my definition, I think, still holds: zines are the creative outpourings of an underground world that passes below the radar of most people.48

Indeed, one glance in the book Fanzines by Teal Triggs shows that paper zines are still abundantly present in the 21st century.49 However, the zines Duncombe refers to look very similar to their late twentieth century counterparts: stapled, photocopied booklets with a cut-and-paste aesthetic, while the photography zines that were discussed at the beginning of this article, as well as those included in the final chapter of Triggs' book, look entirely different from these: they are sleek, professionally printed, with careful attention to paper and binding. The zines published by the Dutch Rebecca Rijsdijk form an appropriate example of this trend. Her imprint, Sunday Mornings at the River, publishes photography zines that are hand-bound on carefully selected paper (an example is shown in Figure 7). The design is balanced, clean, and sober - the complete opposite from the hastily put-together publications from twenty years ago. So what has happened to the zine in the 21st century?

Before answering this question, it is useful to take a moment to think about the reasons why someone would still go through the trouble of publishing a paper commodity in the digital age? For Duncombe, making zines today is ‘merely an exercise in nostalgia,’ suggesting that their value as a powerful and fairly direct communication channel has somewhat diminished, and people are now publishing zines to reminisce about a long gone, pre-digital age.50 However, Jenny Freedman, librarian at the Barnard Zine Collection in New York, does not agree: she sees intrinsic value in the p-zine format that cannot be reproduced digitally. In an essay titled ‘Zines are not Blogs’, Freedman names a number of characteristics that make blogging inherently different: blogs can be published immediately, they can be changed or removed at any time, and they allow interactivity: all elements that do not hold true for static, printed zines. Moreover, blogs can never fully be called one's own, as bloggers usually rely on a platform that allows them to publish their articles. These platforms have the power to remove anything that might be in violation with their terms and conditions. ‘Part of what makes zines what they are



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Figure 5a and b. Images from A Story to share, a photography zine by Roberto Rubalcava, published by Sunday Mornings at the River


and what makes them so great is the total freedom not afforded to, but taken by the zinester’, she adds, rephrasing Duncombe's thoughts on zines in the punk age.51

Contemporary zines highlight their tangibility through the use of special papers, printing techniques and bindings. This could be the result of an increased importance given to the notion of tactility. For example, previously screen printing was seen as unnecessarily laborious and costly, but now it is a popular practice among zine publishers. As a result, Triggs argues, ‘[t]he immediacy offered by earlier cut-and-paste and photocopied zines was replaced by a more intentional and time-based act of making’.52 This complements Freedman's argument above that zines in the digital age are deliberately slow. In a time where so many of our interactions are digital, the notion of tactility has become increasingly important. As a result, people start to long for things that are tangible, and thus, perhaps, more meaningful.53 Zinester Michael Sieben sums up the position of the zine in the digital age as following:

The Internet appeared and blogs sort of took over the role of zines for a time, but they've had a comeback in the hands of artists and designers. They are still used to share people's personal ideas, but I think there's a new generation of makers who are finding the idea of making a physical publication on their own really refreshing after years of working with computers.54

Adding to this discussion, and echoing Freeman and Triggs, Florian Cramer, a new media professor at the Hogeschool Rotterdam, argues that ‘zines are made because they are not blogs’.55 They are certainly not old-fashioned, like some people might suggest, or ‘retro’, but, rather, an answer to the digital age. ‘They [...] exist in the frame of the Internet as something they choose to be not, or choose to be an alternative to’, Cramer notes in an essay titled ‘Analog media as (anti-)social networking’.56 This is symptomatic of what Ludovico calls ‘post-digital print culture, a culture in which the false dichotomy of “print” versus “electronic” [...] is suspended’ and in which, to paraphrase Cramer, artists revert to print because it is more successful in conveying a message than a digital equivalent.57 It is not just a sense of longing for something tangible that drives these

people, but, rather, the conviction that blogs, or other forms of online publication, simply do not succeed in transferring what they want to say. This does not mean that contemporary zines are made by Luddites, it is quite the opposite: they are a direct result of digital media, having been produced because of and using digital technologies. In Zine soup, a 2009 collection of international zines, one editor mentions that ‘what makes zines a worthwhile endeavour in our digitised world is that you really have to put time and thought into them for them to be any good at all.’58

A considerable part of this group of contemporary zine makers is made up by artists, and, notably, photographers, fuelled by the current boom in self-published photography books. These artists appear to have discovered the zine format as a good, easy, or quick way to get their work seen by peers, much like science fiction fanzine editors who spread their stories and commentaries, punks who covered concerts too radical for mainstream outlets, feminists who shared their views, and just about any teen anywhere in the world who ever saw a zine and thought: I'll make one myself, with my own views, writings, and artwork.

Throughout the past century, as technology improved, the zine publishing process became faster and faster. Punk zines in particular were known for their immediacy, due to their cutting edge reviews and unpolished, diy aesthetic. In the digital age, zines appear to do the exact opposite: they offer a moment of undistracted focus, drawing attention to their materiality. At the same time, and true to their history, they remain an open and low-cost platform for unfiltered ideas and niche, subcultural communication. In the post-digital age, the zine has moved into yet another direction.

Postscript: Zine archives in Belgium and the Netherlands

These past pages gave a broad historical overview of the zine, discussing its origins and rise as a medium of individual expression, appropriated by various subcultural groups throughout the twentieth century. In this discussion, a few Dutch examples were highlighted to illustrate that zine publishing was not and is not merely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. However, there are not many sources available discussing zine publishing in the Netherlands and Flanders, and the few zines catalogued in archives appear to have been collected rather sporadically, and not as part of a targeted acquisition plan.

This is different in the United States. In 1992, Mike Gunderloy from the ‘metazine’ Factsheet Five donated his entire collection of over 10,000 zines dating from 1982-1992 to the New York State Library in Albany, ny, making it one of the largest collections of its kind in the world.59 Since then, other libraries across the country have also started to focus on

collecting zines, sometimes focused on a specific subculture, and sharing knowledge about the hurdles of this process. The website of the Barnard Zine Library lists over a hundred active zine libraries in the U.S., quite a few of these being part universities or public libraries.60 The argument for collecting zines, librarians seem to agree, is that they contribute to a diverse collection that incorporates different points of view.61

It is not that Dutch and Flemish zines are absent from institutional libraries and archives because there are not enough of them to make them into an object worth archiving. There are plenty of grassroots zine intiatives that prove otherwise, such as Zsa Zsa Zines62 in Amsterdam, an archive focusing on zines by and for queers, transgenders and people of colour, and fel (standing for Feminist and Leftist), which has a small zine collection in Ghent.63 Topo Copy64 in Ghent has a zine library with a clear focus on graphic design and other visual arts. There are also events bringing together the zine community, like Grafixx65 in Antwerp, LesVoiZines' Zine Happenings,66 Zine Camp67 in Rotterdam, and so on. Why Belgian and Dutch zines remain largely unstudied, especially in a book-historical context, is unclear. Perhaps the most obvious explanation would be that however many events there are about zines in Belgium and the Netherlands, they still remain a niche, and it might just be that not enough researchers, archivists and librarians are aware of them, or are aware of the long and broad history that they are part of. Another reason might be that history of zines spans so many subcultures and involves so many research fields that their study requires in-depth sociohistorical knowledge of youth and alternative culture to grasp their meaning and context. Finally, it is impossible to study a medium without having access to it. As a result, perhaps the first step in fostering zine research is to start actively collecting them, with a clear vision about the type of zines that are collected, making them available to the public, before these ephemeral historical documents are forever lost.


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