Small press and Zine resources

I’ve been coming across a few resources from the late 20th century that resonate with modernist magazine concerns. Here are a couple of Counterculture and Punk resources that may strike your fancy.

For a ’68 take on little journals, here is the first paragraph from the Douglas Blazek review “THE little PHENOMENA” (reprinted in The Portable Sixties Reader 267ff)
“Literature is now a wheel of fire and it’s burning a new cycle into the skulls of more people than ever before—mostly young people who first heard of gas chambers instead of jolly ice cream cones and ferris wheels. There is more direct communication, more involvement in life, more concern for the acts & paths of man in literature than ever before & 90% of this fire is located in the little magazines & small press publications that slither out of ungodly mimeos & bread-sucking offsets & even out of a few ambitious speed-veined hand letterpresesses”

Some of broadsides, manifestos, leaflets, and publications are available through the Digger Archives online.

Pushing forward to Punk subculture, there are quite a few of zines in the Punk Zine Archive, though most of these are dealing directly or indirectly with the music and scene. It has some pretty extensive runs of several of these publications.

If you’re interested in checking out a good recent zine and perhaps bringing it into your classes, I’ve been enjoying Erick Lyle’s On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City which gathers pieces on San Francisco from his zines including Scam which has recently had its first four issues reprinted by Microcosm.