A news article in The Richmonder describes the creation of Celebrating Trans Joy: Building Communities, a 100+-page zine sponsored by the ACLU-Virginia. The article, Richmond’s Trans Community Embraces an Underground Literary Form: The Zine, discusses the importance of trans visibility in libraries such as the Library of Virginia and the Richmond Independent Zine Library.

cover of the book Celebrating Trans Joy: Building Communities

REFORMA, the The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking, will host a webinar about Latino-created zines on Tuesday May 20th. “Latino Zines: Celebrating Our Cultures and Communities”
will also discuss the libraries that are developing zine collections to preserve and share these unique creations. Speakers:

• Ziba Perez, Zine Librarian at L. A. Public Library, L.A. Zine Fest & ALA Zine Pavillion Co-Organizer, REFORMA Board member
• Rosa Celestino Bernal, Reference and Instruction Librarian and Information Studies Professor at Santa Ana College and Los Angeles Valley College.
• Medar de la Cruz, Cartoonist/ Illustrator, Digital designs, Ink drawings, Rikers Public Memory Project
• Iván Salinas is a Mexican writer & zinester based in the San Fernando Valley. He is the co-founder of Drifter Zine and Paloma Press

Excited to learn about La Fanzinoteca del Museo Universitario del Chopo (the zine library at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico) in Mexico City. Multiple collections highlight different topics such as alternative comics, contemporary Mexican fanzines, and punk culture in Mexico. Full scans of many zines are available on the site in addition to finding aids.

Excited to hear about the new Zines Forever! DIY Publications and Disability Justice exhibit at the Wellcome Collection in London. The display draws on some of the 1,300 zines at the Wellcome and “explores how the making and sharing of zines can further disability activism and political resistance and serve as a vehicle for community building and mutual support.”

A nice article from the Carleton College student newspaper, “Special Collections and Art History Department host ‘Library on Legs’ event,” written by Clare O’Connor. The article describes a “Library on Legs” event hosted by Gould Library’s Special Collections and the Department of Art and Art History, along with a library display and a zinemaking workshop from a local artist.

Swiss librarian Guillaume Pasquier’s blog, Biblog, is subtitled “a digital librarian’s notebook” and features interesting stories about libraries and books. A recent post, Dans les magasins, des mag-… euh, des fanzines, shares his discovery of ” the richness of the fanzine universe.” Guillaume invites librarians in the Geneva area to a January 2025 group visit to the Geneva fanzine library (La fanzinothèque genevoise). I hope there will be a followup post with highlights from the tour!

Really enjoyed “Transformative Collections,” a news story about a collaboration between students/faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago and incarcerated women at the Cook County Department of Corrections. The UIC Library had an integral part in supporting the RESTORE zine, part of the Rehabilitation and Engagement Supporting Therapeutic Outcomes of Renewal and Empowerment project.

If you’re a zinester or a librarian, consider taking this interesting new survey: Imagining Relationships Between Zine Creators and Zine Librarians. It’s part of a research project by Al Cassada at the University of Alabama considering the best ways for zine librarians to build relationships with zine creators. Participants from non-U.S. areas are welcome to take the survey; however, it’s only available in English. The survey takes about 15 minutes and will be open until November 1st. I’m looking forward to seeing the results!

One of our zine librarian colleagues from England, Lilith Cooper. has shared their recently published PhD thesis titled The zINe-Between: A Creative Practice Exploration of Health, Liminality, Lived Experience and the Zines in Wellcome Collection. The abstract describes its scope:

Wellcome Collection, a museum and library in London, UK, has intentionally collected zines around health, medicine and the human condition since 2016. The outcome of a Collaborative Doctoral Award with Wellcome Collection, this creative practice thesis explores some of these 1000+ zines, alongside selected zines outside the collection, grouped around three themes: zines made in, from or about beds; zines which involve becoming disabled; and zines created during the COVID-19 pandemic. This exploration moves between physical and digital zines, feeling out both their distinct qualities and the space between them as a route into contemporary zine (re)production, cultures and communities.

This project is composed of two interwoven parts: a collection of original zines created over its duration and an accompanying critical thesis. Through a creative methodology which brings together zine making, autoethnographic and phenomenological approaches to zines, and semi-structured interviews with librarians at Wellcome, I argue that the concept of liminality offers a productive framework for examining material, cultural and political aspects of contemporary zines’ content, production and communities of practice. In turn, the thesis contributes to a reconceptualisation of liminality, beyond the carefully managed processes of transition described in ethnographic accounts, as ongoing, affective, embodied, messy, and non-linear.

Both drawing on and extending interdisciplinary theories of liminality, the thesis focuses on zines made from and about spaces (sickbeds), experiences (becoming disabled) and times (the COVID-19 pandemic) that are in-between, transitional, or transformative. Whilst narrative approaches and approaches that prioritise the usefulness of lived experience to medicine, research or policy often treat liminality as a period of chaos, nonsense or absence, these zines made of and from the in-between offer insight into these periods of liminality in experiences of health, illness and disability. They hold space for the episodic, fragmented and non-linear, engage in affective sense-making, (re)produce third-space knowledges and prioritise the uses of lived experience for peers.

Within the original set of zines created alongside this thesis are zines which directly addresses the concerns of chapters, zines which involve and document wider practices of reproduction, distribution, and collection, as well as those which challenge or disrupt conventions of academic research. Zine making, as a practice-based research method, offers a generative approach to both an archival collection which is proximal, intimate, living, and liminal, and to archival objects which are visual-material-textual, records of practices and processes, and traces of communities of practice as much as products. Produced from the liminal positionality of doctoral research, these zines echo the ways that the zines in Wellcome Collection document and inhabit liminal experiences, spaces and times.