Most Saturday afternoons I’m usually recording my expenses in the cheque transaction booklet and cleaning house so that later in the day I can work on what I enjoy most: writing. But this Saturday I ditched the usual routine and took a bus out to the second annual Sacramento Zine Fest held held at the Verge Center for the Arts in downtown. My first experience with zines was when I picked up a couple free Science Fiction Fanzines at my first full sci fi/fantasy convention, BayCon in San Jose, several years ago. Soon, I came across one called The National Fantasy Fan and purchased a membership that gave me as many as six issues a year. I even wrote a review of a Larry Niven book for one. That was one of my first published works. Ever since then, I’ve always been interested in the zine scene. Many famous speculative fiction writers started off writing for fantasy and science fiction fanzines--Harlan Ellison and William Gibson to name two. 

So what is a zine? Simply put, it was the thing in self-publishing before self-publishing went online. Zines are self-published magazines and books produced on low budgets and by small special interest (or niche) groups. They are normally what the big, traditional publishing houses won’t publish because they do’t fit their marketing agendas. Before self-publishing went online, many unknown writers and artists would publish cheaply, produced magazines called “zines”. Many of these were published by special interest clubs such as science fiction and fantasy fan groups, political interest groups, pop music clubs, and artists clubs.

But as much as internet has made it easier to publish higher quality products, zine publication still continues today online and off. Much of its survival is due to the interest in the print-based culture of the medium but also in its small community focus. It’s like print books and vinyl records today: there’s streaming music and e-books so why do we need vinyl or print? We need it because there is an experience and culture in the art that we don’t get through intangible, digital images and text.

Here are some of the highlights from the Sacramento Zine Fest:

A table that sold copies of mini zine books of art and short stories. One of these I bought for only two bucks (I told you they’re produced on very low budgets!): a mini booklet of “bad” short stories. However, as I told the author who was selling these, “bad” is relative. I read all of them on the bus going home and most of them are actually good at least as humour.

Comic Books: from full length ones by Sacramento’s Eben Burgoon to pocket-size/quarter-folded ones by others.

Fandom arts and crafts such as ones of Mario Brothers characters and Hello Kitty.

A table displaying a sample of the Sacramento Public Library’s zine collection. The library subdivides this collection into locally produced zines that they shelve in their central branch’s Sacramento Room and a general collection for zines that were produced elsewhere and so are shelved elsewhere. 

I asked the library staff woman at the table if they accept fantasy and science fiction fanzines for donations and she said, delightedly, that they do and that they even have a Star Trek zine in their collection. I told her I might have some extra zines of the genre that I may want to donate. Today was the first time I heard about their zine collection. So, as I told her, I’ll have to stop by the library sometime and check it out!

A zine author’s 1920s Royal typewriter. She said it was still in working condition. It reminded me of Harlan Ellison’s collection of old typewriters. He wrote his stories using a manual one even into the age of PCs. This is a good thing if it makes the author work more comfortably.

Other zines and related stuff: political publications, transgendre publications and art, tattoo and punk zines and art.

Sure there’s internet that allows us to publish whatever we want in one form or another. But print zines are a culture within themselves which consists of subcultures within that in which fantasy, horror and science fiction fanzines are just a few of. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, they also tend to draw people to real time and space events such as Sacramento Zine Fest.

Do you or have you read or written for a zine?

Next time: Another Insecure Writer’s Support Group post which will be up a week from this Wednesday. So there may or may not be a post next Saturday.

Until next time . . .