How little, self-published magazines survived the age of the Internet (video)

How to make a zine from one piece of printer paper

If the Internet allows people to share their unadulterated ideas, what are zines still doing here?

The small, self-published magazines started as a platform for science fiction fans to write their own stories around the 1930s. As the punk movement emerged in the 1970s, zines got some countercultural cred and became a platform for unheard voices.

They were an outlet for writing about anything -- food, movies, race, sex - without the influence of editors and publishers, long before the internet brought that power to the masses.

But as evidenced at the Portland Zine Symposium Saturday, July 9, the medium is perhaps as strong as ever.

Portland zine resources






Sure, the internet has videos and GIFs and hyperlinks, and it can make establishing an audience much easier. But like their book cousins, zines offer more than just what's on the page.

"I'm a very tactile person," said Quinn Collard, a Seattle zine maker selling her typewritten "Plaid Skirts and Converse" series at Saturday's symposium. Like many readers who balk at the concept of digital books, Collard prefers to turn a real page.

It's a more personal experience, Collard said, to hold a self-published zine that was written, designed, printed and hand-assembled by its author than it is to read a blog online. Even if the content was the same, there's something to be said for holding in your hands something that was made by someone else's.

Just about everyone you might meet at such a zine gathering would probably say the same thing. Meilani Allen, a writer from Portland who accordion folds her poems and sticks them in tiny boxes, said zines' appeal is all about the rough edges, the imperfections, the unexpected designs. "I think people need that," she said.

"People say the book is going to die. Look at Powell's book store," Allen said, referring to the city-block-sized book seller that is Portland's most famous. "That is never going to happen."

Powell's, as a matter of fact, has its place in preserving zine culture as well. It keeps a section of the store dedicated to small press books and zines and operates a self-publishing center. One of its consistent bestsellers, "Zinester's Guide to Portland," started as a stapled pamphlet over a decade ago.

"The internet is great, and a lot of people are able to use the internet in a similar way that they use zines," said Kevin Sampsell, the zine buyer for Powell's and a do-it-yourself publishing aficionado himself.

"It almost seems like zines are fresh again because everyone's been so preoccupied with the internet," Sampsell said. "You can do just as much cool stuff with paper.

That proved true at the Zine Symposium, where a convergence of graphic artists, writers, designers, poets, scientists and people who just love paper gathered under one name: zinesters. There were comic zines about sad-sack cats and ones about brain research. There was a zine on traveling with kids, and even one that lets you color and cut out zany paper dolls.

You can't do that on the internet.

The Portland Zine Symposium continues 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday, July 10, at Independent Publishing Resource Center, 1001 S.E. Division St. Admission is free.

--Dillon Pilorget |

503-294-5927 | @dillonpilorget