Zine Bakery
🍞 Toasting fresh hot zines on culture, tech, & justice ✊
Explore themed collections featuring zines by Anonymous, Mikako Murphy, Annie Pho, and Ashley Garcia, and many more!
What is the Zine Bakery research project?
The Zine Bakery is not just a catalog and distro; it's a project organizing all my zine-y scholarship:
collecting zines!
- collecting zines at the intersections of culture, tech, and justice
- dataset building: creating & maintaining a relational database with extensive descriptive, evaluative, theme, related resource metadata for each zine (no zine rehosting; always link to creator's site instead)
- preservation of private PDF backups of zines (e.g. in expectation of link rot)
- zine collecting best practices: amplification of the admirable Zine Librarian Code of Ethics, via a collecting rationale and charter, and preservation and distribution practices influenced by that code
amplifying zines!
- public zine catalog interface to a subset of my zine database/metadata
- physical zine distro: distributing a subset of the zines via the Scholars' Lab public space (Zine Bakery @ Scholars' Lab) including all Julia Evans' fantastic tech tutorial zines (huge thanks to Evans!)
- zine redistro hosting (redistribution): web hosting for select zines by other zine authors who don't host their zines online themselves
- graphic design of fun zine- & zine-bakery-related art for stickers, etc.
exploring zines! via research, data physicalization, and more
- data physicalization projects applying makerspace methods to the zine dataset
- research blogging posts on zine research, collecting, making, & data viz
- web dev & Python coding supporting the above (e.g. digital zine quilt)
- tutorials, teaching, & speaking documenting the above scholarship, so others can learn from & build on it
creating zines!
- authoring zines myself & co-authoring zines with others; and sharing them for free download, duplication, and redistribution
Help others find social justice zines
A large subset of the zines I catalogue are related to social justice topics, and many of those SJ zines are free to print and share. You can click to print a sheet of cards/stickers (generously designed by oneironaut17.bsky.social!) to share with your friends, community, or just leave piles in public places for others to find. (Two options: single graphic JPG; PDF of multiple images you can cut into cards.)
I want to hold a zine! 🎶
I prioritize cataloguing zines that are available to print from online for free (or at least allow free online reading), so that these are accessible to more readers. Here's where to read about ways to access zines (online or printed) for free, including for folks without a way to print for free/affordably enough; and some thinking about how to support makers of both free and paid zines.
We recognize & reject genocide
Zine Bakery supports the human rights of Palestinians and others facing genocide.
Zine Bakery has participated in "Can't Zine: Zine Creators Against Genocide in Gaza" (zine creators who oppose Israel's genocide in Gaza and have chosen not to support or take part in Canzine given one of its co-publishers' genocide denial) and the "Crips for eSims for Gaza" project (sharing zines I authored with the Itch.io bundle run by an international collective of disabled people in support of Palestinans, helping Gazans regain internet access via electric sim cards and recognizing "everyone in Gaza is now in some way disabled due to the massive number of deaths, traumatic injuries, life-threatening illnesses and near complete destruction of medical facilities").
The Zine Bakery catalog included 21 (as of my last count in early 2025) zines by Palestinians and/or about supporting Palestinian's human rights.