This blog post originally appeared on my research blog; visit LiteratureGeek.com for more digital humanities, coding, making, book-adjacent work (and any zine posts I forget to copy over here...)
This is a very practical post describing how I’m trying to improve a public space zine display! My current zine rack in the Scholars’ Lab Common Room currently looks okay—the metal rack allows you to see there are zines hanging on the other two of its three sides, and the rainbow of clothespin colors makes me smile.
Photo of the current Scholars’ Lab public space Zine Bakery free zine rack
The rack isn’t ideal, though: the clothespins are plastic and come apart easily, bend the zine covers, and make adding multiples of one zine difficult (you have to start at the bottom of your intended column of zines and layer them upwards, given the clothespin needs to attach to the top of each zine). We’ve also got some clear acrylic wall ledges I’d intended to use for zines, but we want to save the little wall space we have (we’re lucky to have a ton of windows, looking out both onto UVA’s chapel and Rotunda, and into the new skylight atrium in the center of the library building). The whole thing is a little wobbly—I had to reinforce it with metal cable ties (an amazing tool, highly recommend having some on hand) and the whole rack pieces easily unseats from the shallow wheeled base.
I’d like something where it’s easy to place stacks of zines rather than needing to pin them one at a time, since I already have limited time to re-impose, print, fold, and staple all the zines myself. (Colleagues have offered to help, but I need to finish getting the imposition/print instructions correct and documented for each zine first). I also think it’s more inviting to folks who are unused to getting to take a bunch of things for free, to not need to unpin a zine first before being able to flip through it. I’m imaging a combination of a lare flat surface where I can keep a large percent of the SLab-relevant zines in stock, plus a smaller table display where I can place new-to-us zines, or gather small thematic collections of zines.
Jeremy helped me out by creating a Pinterest board of DIY zine options, which helped me build my own Pinterest board with a combination of his pins and some researching those inspired. Ultimately, I want something requiring as little cutting and attaching as possible, so that I actually finish it this fall; and it needs to be free-standing (given lack of wall space) but not take up a huge footprint. Finally, it needs to have some kind of rail around “waist height” (halfway up) standard zine height, so that the zines don’t fall forward and off the ledge.
I think I want to do something like this rack with a solid rectangle leaned on an A-frame, except make the back part more like this rack that uses less total wood so we don’t have to mess with hinging crossbars.
I think that means we’ll need to source:
- for the front, finished (or paintable) flat board with a frame around it
- shallow L-shaped ledges for zines to sit on
- dowel rods, or wires shaped like
[_], to keep middle of zines from falling forward (if dowel rods, need the wood rectangle to have a frame around the edge the dowels can be attached to) - 2 hinges attaching the back frame to front rectangle
- back frame (3 boards)
And I’ll need to figure out:
- Width/spacing of ledges and dowel rods (and size of the large, front flat piece the zines lean back against; this may depend on what the hardware store has on hand)
The two zine rack inspiration images are below. I’ll update if I manage to build this (quite possible I’ll just decide we need to buy something ready-made instead, but I wasn’t finding anything reasonably priced doing what I want, and I really just need a few basic features).
