Behind the zines

It feels almost frivolous to talk about zines at the moment but in another life we would be embarking on our 4 month long summer tour right about now which like a lot of things we’ve had to postpone and hopefully reschedule for another time. It’s left us wondering how we can make the library collections more accessible while the zine library is in lockdown for the foreseeable future.

We don’t digitise any zines in the library. Mostly this is due to our lack of resources, but we also made the decision a long time ago not to reinvent the wheel given that the wonderful Queer Zine Archive Project exists and has developed an invaluable online archive of of hundreds of queer zines free for everyone.

While we have lost most of our funding through cancelling our summer tour, we do have some funds available and want this to go directly to zine makers, so we decided instead to use these funds to launch a new weekly online zine reading series called Behind the Zines. We have invited a number of zine readers to create short videos reading from their zines in our collections, as well as giving insights around processes and ideas behind the making of their zines.

Each week we will post a new zine reading in this series promoting some of the amazing zine makers in our collections and enabling access to the zines while in storage. It won’t be the same kind of experience as reading the zines by yourself, but will hopefully introduce you to some inspiring zine makers and hear their work in their own voices. Our first in the Behind the Zines series will launch tomorrow Thursday 9th April and we’ll post each episode on our website, social media and youtube.

You can also use our online library catalogue to search to see which of our titles are available to read online for free. While we don’t digitise these ourselves we do provide links in the library catalogue to online versions which have been digitised by the zine makers themselves, or via other digitisation projects such as Queer Archive Project or POC Zine Project.

You can do this by using ‘Advanced search’ to limit your results by collection ,selecting the option ‘Online version available’. This will then bring up a list of zines with online versions available, and you can find the link to each online zine by clicking on the title and scrolling down the summary.

In the meantime stay safe, participate and organise collectively through mutual aid, look after your communities and give yourself diy haircuts.