Black Lives Matter ABC's Book Words by James Chow, art by Justin Chow. Publisher Cabrón James.
From Printed Matter website: Alphabet book in which ever letter represents one of the 318 unarmed Black people who have lost their lives to police brutality since Eric Garner in 2014. - Cabrón James
Asian-American Feminist Antibodies {care in the time of coronavirus} by Asian American Feminist Collective and Bluestockings bookstore
PDF may take a while to download. From p. 3: With the COVID-19 pandemic neither behind us or solely ahead of us, this zine
offers a way to make meaning of the coronavirus crisis through long-standing practices of care that come out of Asian American histories and politics. We bring together first-hand accounts and analyses from our communities, including health and service workers and caregivers on the frontlines, students, people living with chronic illness, journalists, and organizers. Together, this collection of stories, essays, and artwork shows how we experience, resist, and grapple with a viral outbreak that has been racialized as Asian, is spoken of in the language of contagion and invasion, and reveals the places where our collective social safety net is particularly threadbare.
Websites for Browsing Digitized (originally printed on paper) or Born Digital Zine
Sherwood Forest Zine Library (Austin, TX)
from website: “Check out our collection of hundreds of free downloadable pdfs and links to online readable zines!” Browse subjects for relevant zine collections.
Student Zines at SUNY College at New Paltz
12 student-made zines about life during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Barnard Zines with Online Links
Click on the title and then look for the “read online or download” link, upper right. Some of these zines have been digitized so that you can get the original booklet version of the zine by printing out double sided and then folding and/or staping. Others are scanned as PDF files or other formats: they can be printed out in most cases, but not in the original booklet form.
Berea College Library Digitized Zines
An online, full-text sampling of the zine collection housed in Berea College's Hutchins Library. Zines digitized as PDF files.
Quarantine Public Library
Quarantine Public Library is a repository of books (one-page aka mini zines) made by artists. "The works published here are for anyone to freely download, print and assemble—to keep or give away."
Printed Matter Digital Downloads
especially great for contemporary protest zines and pamphlets and the 1980s NYC literary journal The Portable Lower East Side.
HIV Doula Work
Digital downloads of zines or pamphlets published by What Would an HIV Doula Do?, "a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis. We understand a doula as someone who holds space during times of transition” (from website). Includes Covid era pamphlets as well.
Exile Books "Zine Pool"
digitized or born digital zines submitted to Exile Books (Miami, Florida)
Project Nia Digitized Publications Launched in 2009, Project NIA is an advocacy, organizing, popular education, research, and capacity-building center with the long-term goal of ending youth incarceration. This is a collection of over 50 zine publications, either "born digital" or digitized
It's wonderful that many historical zines and related publications have been digitized and made widely available. There are a couple points to make about this, however:
(1) Not all zinesters are ok with having their zines digitized and uploaded on the Open Internet. Similarly, some zinesters are not supportive of zines being collected by authoritative institutions like libraries, colleges and universities, and museums. Each of the collections listed in this guide has its own policies and guidelines for digitizing. Institutions or projects should remove material online or in print if the creator/zinester requests the removal.
(2) When zines are digitized, they usually lose their original formatting. Software such as issuu can be used to create a booklet with pages that can be virtually turned. Usually, though, zine pages are just scanned and the zine is turned into a PDF file of single-column pages. (Booklets have two columns.) This is the trade off for being able to view the publication in the digital format.
(3) Mini zines are zines made on one piece of 8.5 x 11 paper. The form of this zine is compromised when viewed on the Internet. Half of it will be upside down! However, anyone can download and print such a zine. The trick is to know how to fold and cut it. Here's an example of a mini zine: Random Things I See on the Streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn That Kinda Make Sense? by Daniel Fishel, from the Quarantine Public Library: The only issue with this zine is having enough color ink to print it!