images from Pace's new Zine+ Collection, housed at the Faculty Center
Zine publishing and creation is more popular than ever, but zines are just part of the larger world of independent, "do it yourself" publishing. This origin story of zines is for students and faculty who want to learn about the making, printing, and publishing that align with zines: pamphlets, underground press, small press, poetry chapbooks, posters, flyers, religious tracts, artists' books, photobooks, and even vinyl and cassette culture. Overall, the print form prevails in the zine world, but this guide includes some discussion about e-zines and digitized, historical zines. In general, zines are part of booklet publications that include chapbooks, pamphlets, and artists' publications. The staple (as in what holds it all together) is usually a key feature of booklet culture.
Notes: [1] This guide is still under construction as of Sept. 21 2021. [2} Not every image in this guide is from the Pace Collection, but most are! There will be a note indicating images that are not.
Book printers manufacture paperback books with a form of bookbinding called perfect binding, in which their pages are glued together to form a spine. Booklets like zines are not perfectly bound but are saddle stitched, a printer's term for stapled or wire stitched, or saddle sewn, bound with a needle and thread or string. A "foldy" zine consist of several pages folded together without any binding. Booklets tend to be produced in small runs, sometimes in numbered editions. Zines, chapbooks, and pamphlets share the booklet form.
