July is International Zine Month. Zines, short for “fanzine” or “magazine,” emerged as a DIY medium in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when Harlem Renaissance writers and science fiction lovers self-published booklets with their personal musings.
The medium continued to expand over the decades, and reached a new peak in the 1970’s with the rise of photocopying machines and punk culture.
Zine culture is deeply rooted in San Francisco’s underground scenes. Artists and writers experiment with binding techniques, poetry, writing, and illustration to create zines that examine queerness, activism, community-building, politics and personal stories on their own terms. Today, the fluidity of the form continues to evolve. Places like the Prelinger Library document its history.
It’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth of halls that houses the Prelinger Library, but at the end of the way I find myself in a room with several tall shelves filled with books, maps, and other ephemera. I meet Rick and Megan Prelinger, the library’s founders, who show me around the archive — which holds more than 7,000 zines.
"We're standing right in front of it right now. It's about 40 cartons of zines," says Rick. "And it's this incredible, just galaxy of sort of independent and community thinking."
Rick describes himself as coming from the “old school punk generation,” and remembers picking up zines at record stores. Megan was part of the political zine collaborative “Bad Subjects” in the mid 1990’s. Much of the zine collection at Prelinger comes from Epicenter Zone, a punk rock hangout space that flourished in the Mission in the 1990s. After it closed, the library became the home for its zine archives.
"This is a universe in a banker's box," says Rick. "You know, I want to say, I mean, it just takes you through so many different corners of human experience, right?"
"Here’s a zine title," says Megan. “Am I totally normal? Two.”
Megan tells me that zines tap into a deeply human need — to express oneself.
"In a way, I think it both transforms all the time and doesn't transform at all," says Megan. "Because artists made, you know, personal pamphlet literature forever. Some of the forms of the media shift a bit with time and with changes in technologies, but I think that impulse is pretty perennial."
Zines skirt the boundaries of traditional media and they also reject usual modes of sale.
"It's not being subject to the rules of, you know, the economy. You can just give it away," says Rick. "You can make it just for your friends. You can hand it out at a concert. It's an individual taking a position that doesn't involve having to leverage these big networks that don't care about you."
Rick says that for many marginalized communities, zines are the go-to medium to share perspectives that are often ignored in broader media.
"These are ordinary people trying to create and trying to cope and and also saying, “I'm here, you know, I'm alive,” and that's important to preserve that," says Rick.
