I’m sharing this post by Charissa (Wasted Ink Distro) from Facebook to Latine folks selling zines and zine librarians and others buying zines. Zine librarians might want to avoid buying items from collectors anyway, but this one in particular…
Please be on the lookout for Alfonso Vijil from Libros Latinos at your zine fests. We’ve recently learned he’s been buying zines, specifically from BIPOC creators and then turns around and sells them for 3-5x the original cost to libraries without telling the zine maker or paying them the profit. He was at LA Zine Fest buying zines and was seen as recently as this past weekend at an event buying zines.
Some zines that sell for $3 from the creator are listed on his site for over $20 and he has full zine collections selling for $3000 and even $5000.
When creators and distros like myself emailed him to tell him this wasn’t rad and he didn’t have permission to resell the zines, he’s told us to be quiet and to be grateful. He told us that we could NEVER do the work he does to organize collections for libraries. Which is silly because many distros and zinesters work directly with public and academic libraries. He’s called people names and been incredibly rude overall.Photo of him is in the comments with the goal of having us recognize this person and make sure we’re protecting our BIPOC folks by informing them so they can make consensual decisions about how their zines are distributed.
Feel free to ask any questions if you wanna.
And here’s the photo
