POETICKS

Small Press Review, Volume 27, Number 2, February 1995

 
 
 
     The World of Zines,
     A Guide to the Independent Magazine Revolution,
     by Mike Gunderloy and Cari Goldberg Janice. 1992;
     181 pp; Pa; Penguin Books, 375 Hudson Street,
     New York NY 10014. $14.

However pure of heart those of us who carry on our writing or publishing projects deep in the hinterlands of the hinterlands might be, I doubt that many of us have not dreamed of a day when something will go wrong, and a beserk minute projection of some precinct of the BigTime will shoot out in our direction and beyond, then halt, permanently–with us inside it. That the BigTime will have accommodated us rather than the other way around will, of course, allow us to accept the situation. And that is what recently happened to Mike Gunderloy, for this summer Penguin Books published a book he co-authored with Cari Goldberg Janice.

Gunderloy had been active in the micro-press for some ten years prior to that, having–at the age of 22 or so–founded Factsheet Five. This was a sort of “zine zine” that specialized in reviewing other zines (a zine being a kind of periodical that is to small press magazines what the latter are to, well, Cosmopolitan or NewsWeek). Factsheet Five was purely a hobby at that point. Working out of his garage (or the equivalent), Gunderloy gradually turned it into something resembling a real business, eventually having it printed by offset and getting it commercially distributed. His last issue had a press run of over 10,000 copies. That in itself wasn’t enough to bring him financial success. What it did, though, was establish him as an authority on zines, which were the subject of the book Penguin signed him up for, The World of Zines. And now he’s getting national press coverage–and making at least a little money.

(Factsheet Five, by the way, is still coming out, though now under the stewardship of Seth Friedman.)  According to one newspaper article on Gunderloy, at least one other editor has recently been directly absorbed from a zine into the BigTime: a fellow named Christian Gore. Seven years ago, at the age of 19, he started a six-page zine on movies called Film Threat that is now a slick with a circulation of 125,000. So, while the only sane reason to begin a zine is to say things, however privately, that the mainstream isn’t, dreaming of one day reaching a public of some size is not entirely irrational.
In any event, if you’re at all interested in zines–as a publisher or would-be publisher of one, or as just a reader–I highly recommend The World of Zines to you. It provides excellent, if brief, reviews, such as the one that follows concerning Raleigh Clayton Muns’s Fugitive Pope, which I chose at random from the 300-plus that The World of Zines contains:

Life as a librarian need not be terminally dull, as Raleigh proves over and over again in these pages. He recounts strange questions encountered at the reference desk, gives us glimpses of what it’s really like in librarian school and suggests ways to discourage masturbation in the stacks. Along the way, bits and pieces of obscure writing are dropped in–almost as much fun as finding them serendipitously among the stacks.

All kinds of other zines are treated including ones devoted to flying saucers, old Norse religions, sports, hobbies and collecting, “hip whatnot,” travel, fringe politics–and even experimental art. Speaking of this last item, it is refreshing to note that Gunderloy and Janice parcel out almost as much space to graphics, rants, poems and other matter culled from the zines they discuss as they do to their own comments. Hence, we’re not just told about zines, we’re meaningfully exposed to parts of them. Contact and ordering information for every publication mentioned is included, too. Moreover, a number of pages at the book’s end deal in detail with the nitty-grit of starting, running and circulating one’s own zine.

Of course, it can’t be said that The World of Zines is perfect: every connoisseur of the field will find dozens of terrible omissions (where, for example, is my favorite zine, the subtle journal of raw coinage?!?). Considering that there are something like 20,000 zines extant (according to the authors’ estimate, which seems sound to me), this is inevitable. It is not important, for the object of the book is to introduce the scene it covers, not exhaustively memorialize it, and introduce it The World of Zines does with efficiency and flair.