Why

My main view in starting a zine distro has always been to ‘share’ my favourite zines with others.  I need something more than a passive coffee table zine-sharing avenue.  I also strongly believe in zinewriters having somewhere to put their works – they can’t get into my house and stick this new (and very impressive) zine on my or your coffee table so what more could they do than attend a few zine fairs, put on their brave friendmaking face and peddle their self-published works?

Since this zine distro had begun, my view on the zine world has widened quite extensively.  Friends that I never knew were zinemakers were coming out from the cracks in the floorboards and handing over these beautiful, heartfelt, instant-bestseller-in-my-books stories.  Arty folk that draw or paint or build things were starting to become zinemakers too and thus the circle has widened.  I’d like to see a day when every person I meet on the street (or even everyone at a zine fair) will have a pretty broad idea of what a zine is.  It’s funny, I find it hard to explain to people exactly what a zine is because once you get down to these terms — self-published, booklets, whatever the writer wishes to share — you’re sort of cutting it down to a level where actually, it’s pretty damn broad.  For instance, my zines are full of different things like little stories, tidbits, pictures, poems, who knows what.. while other zines I have found have no words whatsoever, or no pictures, or no damn content even.  I’ve even had zines that are letters to you.  I push some zines on to those uninformed people and then I sit and wait.  I will sit and wait a year even for them to come back to that same hall at the same time and have them tell me they loved what they read and could they ppleeeeaase have some more of whatever that was.  And that makes it all worthwhile really.