International Zine Month 2025

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July is International Zine Month! Back in 2009, zinester Alex Wrekk started International Zine Month, and we’ve all joined in since then. Thanks to Alex for creating this gorgeous poster giving us something to celebrate each day of #IZM2025. Note that July 21st is Zine Library Day—the traditional way to celebrate is visiting your favorite in person or online zine collection (and bringing a delicious treat to your favorite zine librarian!).

IZM2025-poster

Minizine about the zine community

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Found a great minizine by longtime zinester Brigette of Commonplace Zines titled “Zine Community Guide.” Brigette shares thoughts about what makes the zine community nurturing and accepting, sharing these guidelines in the hopes of keeping what’s great about the community:

  • swap zines freely and often
  • respect your zine elders
  • nurture baby zinesters in any way you can
  • respect the long arm of the stapler
  • office copiers are a way to reclaim your energy

Download the one-page zine for printing at the Commonplace Zines substack.

Zine Pavilion 2025 collaborative zine

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Big thanks to everyone who attended the American Library Association annual conference and visited the Zine Pavilion! If you contributed to the Zine Pavilion 2025 Collaborative Zine, you can print out a copy for yourself (use “print on the short side” or “booklet” settings). We had so many contributions that we had to split them into two parts!

Download both issues on the Zine Pavilion itch.io account.

ZinePavilionCollaborativeZine_Part1 ZinePavilionCollaborativeZine_Part2

ASL signs for zine-related words

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Over on the Zines & GLAM Discord, Laura Chenault always does a great job of keeping up with new blog posts, videos, and other resources about zines. One new video she highlighted caught my attention, Zine Signs by Deaf zinester Emmett. Emmett demonstrates ASL (American Sign Language) signs for zine-related terms such as comic, copy, make, collage, festival, pay, and more. Watch the video (remember you can adjust the playback speed if you need to see it done more slowly) and practice these signs for your next zine event!

Zine Pavilion at ALA Annual 2025

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The organizers of the Zine Pavilion are busy getting ready for the 2025 Zine Pavilion at the American Library Association conference in Philadelphia. The hours of the Zine Pavilion are the same as the ALA exhibit hall hours:

  • Friday June 27, 5:30 pm – 7 pm
  • Saturday June 28, 9 am – 5 pm
  • Sunday June 29, 9 am – 5 pm
  • Monday June 30, 9 am – 2 pm

If you’re attending ALA, please come visit us! We’ll have hundreds of zines on display and zinesters from the Philly area will be selling their zines.

map of the American Library Association conference exhibit hall floor, with large red arrows pointing to the location of the Zine Pavilion.

location of the Zine Pavilion on the ALA exhibit hall floor— booth number 1862

We’ll also have multiple events happening at the Zine Pavilion! Those events include:

  • Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, all day: Collaborative Zine-Making. Come create a page for the Zine Pavilion 2025 collaborative zine! We’ll have all the supplies you need. You can pick up the finished zine on Monday from noon-2 pm.
  • Saturday June 28, 1-2 pm: Starting a Zine Library. Looking to start a zine collection at your library? Join this panel of public librarians to learn tips and tricks for getting your collection off the ground.
  • Saturday June 28 2-3 pm: Zines Out Loud! Zine Reading. We’ll have zinesters reading snippets from their zines. This is always a great time!
  • Saturday June 28, 3-4 pm: ZineCat Show ‘n’ Tell. Join several members of the Zine Union Catalog team for a status update on ZineCat, a union catalog dedicated to zines. The catalog is built on the open access platform Collective Access and is made with zine creators in mind as much as catalogers and researchers.
  • Sunday June 29, 1:30-2:30 pm: Zines and Academia. Whether you’re looking to create a pop-up zine collection in your library, make zines to show off student-created data visualizations, or used zines to market library services, come and share your experiences and ideas for using zines in academic library environments.
  • Monday June 30, 10-11 am: Zine Thesaurus: An Alternative to LCSH for Radical Resources. Learn about a controlled vocabulary thoughtfully created and maintained by a collective of zinesters and LIS workers specifically for the description of zines and other radical materials, providing more robust discoverability of non-traditional library and archival materials.

flyer for a Zine Pavilion event titled "Starting a Zine Library"

Trans zines in the Library of Virginia

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A news article in The Richmonder describes the creation of Celebrating Trans Joy: Building Communities, a 100+-page zine sponsored by the ACLU-Virginia. The article, Richmond’s Trans Community Embraces an Underground Literary Form: The Zine, discusses the importance of trans visibility in libraries such as the Library of Virginia and the Richmond Independent Zine Library.

cover of the book "Celebrating Trans Joy: Building Communities" featuring drawings of polaroid images of the artists in the book.

cover of the book Celebrating Trans Joy: Building Communities

Celebrating Latino zines webinar

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REFORMA, the The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking, will host a webinar about Latino-created zines on Tuesday May 20th. “Latino Zines: Celebrating Our Cultures and Communities”
will also discuss the libraries that are developing zine collections to preserve and share these unique creations. Speakers:

  • Ziba Perez, Zine Librarian at L. A. Public Library, L.A. Zine Fest & ALA Zine Pavillion Co-Organizer, REFORMA Board member
  • Rosa Celestino Bernal, Reference and Instruction Librarian and Information Studies Professor at Santa Ana College and Los Angeles Valley College.
  • Medar de la Cruz, Cartoonist/ Illustrator, Digital designs, Ink drawings, Rikers Public Memory Project
  • Iván Salinas is a Mexican writer & zinester based in the San Fernando Valley. He is the co-founder of Drifter Zine and Paloma Press

Fanzinoteca in Mexico City

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Excited to learn about La Fanzinoteca del Museo Universitario del Chopo (the zine library at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico) in Mexico City. Multiple collections highlight different topics such as alternative comics, contemporary Mexican fanzines, and punk culture in Mexico. Full scans of many zines are available on the site in addition to finding aids.

screenshot of the Fanzinoteca website, showing colorful images representing different collections of zines, and the text "La Fanzinoteca del Museo Universitario del Chopo es un proyecto transversal que ha estado integrado por inicitaivas educativas, curatoriales, editoriales, de divulgación y de archivo. El objetivo ha sido generar espacios de reflexión, diálogo e intercambio, que exploren y reivindiquen la cultura del fanzine y la autopublicación y las maneras en que estas publicaciones experimentales, ágiles y explosivas interpelan a las prácticas de archivo. En colaboración con coleccionistas y productores, se ha conformado un archivo físico y digital, que al mismo tiempo que recopila y abriga parte de dichas prácticas autogestivas, busca reconocer a las comunidades que se vinculan a partir de ellas."

Zine library crawl in Boston

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logo for The Greater Boston Zine Library Crawl, featuring swirling illustrations of zine pages and flowers

Very cool to see this Greater Boston Zine Library Crawl happen in April 2025! The Zine Crawl Passport has a list of locations; by visiting the libraries, participants can win zine making supplies and physical zines.

Participating public and academic libraries include:

*BPL participating branches include:

Description of how the Zine Library Crawl works. Text reads: "This April, you're invited to check out as many zine libraries in the Greater Boston area as you can! Complete your zine passport, available at the circulation desk, for an opportunity to win prizes, including free goodies from the participating libraries, zine making supplies, and physical zines from area zine members."

Disability justice zines at the Wellcome Collection

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Excited to hear about the new Zines Forever! DIY Publications and Disability Justice exhibit at the Wellcome Collection in London. The display draws on some of the 1,300 zines at the Wellcome and “explores how the making and sharing of zines can further disability activism and political resistance and serve as a vehicle for community building and mutual support.”

screenshot of the linked article "Zines Forever! DIY Publications and Disability Justice" showing a person sitting at a table reviewing five disability-related zines.

The Role of Academic Libraries in the Shifting Landscape of Zines

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There’s a new guest editorial in the March 2025 issue of College & Research Libraries, “The Role of Academic Libraries in the Shifting Landscape of Zines” by Evan Bobrow. Bobrow writes about several topics important in zine librarianship: the fuzzy definitions of zines, what it means to create a printed zine in the age of the Internet and social media, the authority conferred on zines by including them in a library collection, and how seeing zines (especially scrappy, less-polished zines) can inspire people to create their own. The editorial ends with this lovely thought:

“There is a magic to holding a zine in your hands, only to be suddenly struck with inspiration to create. Zine libraries have the opportunity to bring this experience to all who visit, and therein lies their power.”

Zines on display at Carleton College library in Minnesota

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A nice article from the Carleton College student newspaper, “Special Collections and Art History Department host ‘Library on Legs’ event,” written by Clare O’Connor. The article describes a “Library on Legs” event hosted by Gould Library’s Special Collections and the Department of Art and Art History, along with a library display and a zinemaking workshop from a local artist.screenshot of the title of the article "Special Collections and Art History Department host “Library on Legs” event" featuring an image of multiple zines on display.

Brazilian virtual zine collection

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the front page of the Biblioteca de Zines website, featuring the caption "Uma biblioteca virtual para catalogar e arquivar iniciativas independentes em formato de zine" (translated to English, that's "A virtual library to catalog and archive independent initiatives in zine format"

In January a new site launched: Biblioteca de Zines, a very cool online, open source collection of zines from Brazil, created by Luana Góes. All zines are available via pdf and most are in Portuguese. The layout is beautiful, check out their GitHub account to see how the site was built using Next.js, and find more information about the zine library in their newsletter.

Bem-vindo ao mundo, Biblioteca de Zines!

an example of three zines from the catalog, featuring cover images, titles, and short descriptions of each zine.