Each year, the publishing industry makes billions of dollars by selling books that tens or hundreds of thousands of people will read. Which books will they publish? The answer is simple: the ones that will make businessmen a profit, or make sponsoring government agencies happy. But beyond the mainstream industry, there are also thousands of people lovingly making their own books too weird, specialized, or challenging for huge readerships, and trading or giving them away to their own communities and friends. Whether called ‘zines, micropress, chapbooks, or pamphlets, they are essentially the same thing: cheap books that anybody can make. Beyond this, they can include almost anything–poetry, comics, politics, collage stories, journalism, photos, and many things there’s no name for. Before the internet, they often served the purposes of blogs, websites and message-boards. Where did this subculture come from? We’ll look at a stack of self-published books from Olchar’s archive, including some almost 200 years old, teen-printed zines from the 1860s, some made by the Roanoke punk scene a decade or two ago, some produced by your own friends here at CHS, and much else. We’ll see how zines have evolved over the years, and been used to discuss sci-fi & horror stories, enjoy in-jokes, bring together musical subcultures, struggle for gender, race, and class equality, share alternative comics, and even resist fascist dictatorships and genocide.
