So my husband and I have decided to organize our large personal zine collection a bit better, display it nicely, and open up our home about once a month as a zine reading room. We are dorks, and we are very excited about this.
Figuring out the best way to arrange the zines was a challenge though. Between us we’ve collected around 500 zines over the last several years, and even though they’re usually much smaller than books, they do take up some space. I thought maybe the zines should be placed in magazine holders of some kind, but Joe wanted them to be out in the open, footloose and fancy-free. Fine, except that the zines can’t be lined up on a bookshelf the way books are, since they don’t really have spines. We decided to display them facing out, so that people could easily see and flip through them, like records in a record store. (This is the method used and written about by Julie Bartel in her book, From A to Zine: Building a Winning Zine Collection in Your Library, according to an uncredited article I found online. Download it here. I have heard about Bartel’s book for years but have never read it. Maybe it’s time!)
But zines are also much more varied in size than books tend to be, so it quickly became apparent that, if they were stacked facing outward, the small ones would be lost behind the taller ones. Our solution was to arrange them by size, and alphabetically by title within those size categories. On the top shelf are the quarter-sized zines, on the second shelf are the half-sized ones, and on the bottom shelf are half-legal sized (which are both large and square-shaped). The magazine-sized zines we put in a cool old magazine rack that used to belong to Joe’s grandparents. (It’s metal and has some kind of battle scene in relief on the front of it; the thing looks like it was forged during the Civil War.) The matchbook-sized and otherwise teensy zines went on the top of the bookcase, in cigar boxes.
We also had to find a way to containerize the zines once they were facing outward, so we went to the hardware store and bought plywood, which we painted with that cool chalkboard paint and nailed to the front of the bookcase, one across each shelf. We used colorful chalk to write the alphabet under each row so that folks can easily locate zines by their title.
Have a look!
And for fun (as if all this weren’t the most fun ever), I’ll be posting capsule reviews of zines from our collection over the next few days. Here’s the first:
Captcha #7
Captcha is a gorgeous and imaginative sci-fi comic zine series by Jo-Jo Sherrow, and here we have book #7. Jo-Jo’s drawings are intensely charming, depicting humanoid girls whose clothes and haircuts you will definitely covet, but the comic covers deep, mind-bending subjects. This one focuses on psychic self-defense methods of different kinds.
Indicative Mood 