📆 Summer Saturdays through August 31st, 2024
🕓 4 to 6 pm
📍ZAPP Zine Collection @ Seattle Public Library – Central Library: 1000 4th Ave, Seattle, 7th floor
I made my first zine in the mid-’90s at Professional Copy ‘n’ Print on the Ave (which still exists!). “Frolic” was either bright purple or lurid red, depending on the issue, and featured interviews with local goth bands, vaguely demented short stories, and collages of weird Dover clip art.
Back then, Seattle was awash in zines, about politics and riot grrl music and much else; you’d practically trip over them every time you walked into a cool coffee shop or bar. It makes sense, then, that a zine archive sprung up at the Richard Hugo House in 1996. The Zine Archive and Publishing Project (ZAPP) was a “volunteer-driven living archive” that eventually collected around 30,000 zine titles from Seattle and around the world. In 2016, the Hugo House gave the archive to the Seattle Public Library, which now maintains the collection on the seventh floor of its central branch downtown.
Usually, you can only visit the ZAPP collection via appointment, but from now until Saturday, August 31st, those seventh-floor doors are open every Saturday afternoon from 4 to 6 pm. What will you find if you visit? When I went, there were tiny red artist zines decorated with paper fish and beads; miniature literary zines in gold envelopes; a book of “typecritters” made using typewriter keys; an international mail art magazine I couldn’t stop reading; and “Twister’s Guide to More Pats for Cats” (a comic “written” by Twister the Cat).
If those titles seem far apart, what they all have in common is the zine ethos. First associated with sci-fi fan cultures of the 1930s, then injected with adrenaline by 1970s punk, zines are by their very nature self-directed, ephemeral (usually!), and gloriously unencumbered by the editorial process. And while they’re currently having a bit of a moment, it’s just the latest wave in a scene that never quite faded away.
If you want to poke around in the collection before you go, you can preview the archive by category on the SPL website. But it’s also fun to just show up and let the sheer creativity blow you away. Maybe you’ll be inspired to create a zine of your own that could one day be in a library—you never know.
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