I maintain a collection of zines by authors and on topics of interest to me (Zine Bakery). A majority subset of these are also of interest to the digital humanities research center I direct—the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia—and to the lab’s community. Zine Bakery @ Scholars’ Lab is a public, physical distro of this subset of my Zine Bakery project catalogue, including zines on feminist approaches to technology, digital scholarship tutorials, creativity and making, and social justice advocacy.
The Zine Bakery @ Scholars’ Lab project includes:
- Copies of print zines distributed on a rack in SLab's Common Room public space*
- A digital catalogue of zines, combining the zines we can distribute publicly with others we cannot distribute for various reasons (including only having a single non-reproducable copy in our collection, or zines purchased with staff personal funds).
- A subset of zine titles and metadata in the catalogue available via a public interface: Zine Bakery's public zine catalogue view
- An interest in collecting a copy of any zines authored by or about UVA and Charlottesville folks that the zines' authors wish to share (please email visconti@virginia.edu with a digital copy)
A lot of the zines I’ve collected are available for reading online (as well as printing)—all zines in this sub-collection can be read online for free (see the “free e-reading” column for the links).
* We often have zines available to take away for free, from a rack near the front entrance of Scholars’ Lab’s Common Room (Shannon Library 308). How many copies of how many different zines depends on how much free time I’ve had recently to print them and how quickly folks take them away, so your mileage may vary! If I know you’ll be coming by at least a week before, I can often add some zines related to your interests to the rack for you.
The zine rack location is starred on the map below:
Timeline
- The project began pre-pandemic as personal collecting, quickly followed by distribution of a subset of Visconti's personal zine collecting through a Scholars' Lab "Zine Wall" in a semi-public space that offered free copies of interesting zines as they happen upon them, and via cross-Library working group meetings and a Slack channel.
- The zine project was virtual-only during the renovation of SLab's physical space in the Main Library (2020-2023).
- Spring 2024: zines returned to our public space in the renovated Shannon Library (SLab Common Room, Shannon 308).
- Spring 2024: Amanda published a peer-reviewed journal article on their zine research: “Book Adjacent: Database & Makerspace Prototypes Repairing Book-Centric Citation Bias in DH Working Libraries”.
- Summer 2024: Amanda created the ZineBakery.com site and zine cover viz/quilt. Amanda presented on the Zine Bakery at the international Digital Humanities 2024 conference during August 2024.
- September 2024: Amanda published their first self-authored Zine Bakery "Homemade" zine.
- October 2024: Amanda published another zine, this one co-created with Sam Blickhan.
Policy
We welcome visitors to leave zines in our Common Room (Shannon 308) that they’d like us to distribute there, and/or include a copy in our non-public zine backup archive; you are also welcome to email us digital versions of zines.
We reserve the right to remove and recycle any zines left in our public space for any reason, or to decline to print zine copies or include a zine in our catalogue. This includes if we find zines too unrelated to or antithetical to our values or work. As the collection grows, I am likely to remove some zines that no longer fit my developing areas of focus—not a comment on quality, just an attempt to keep the collection focused on some specific topics. If you have zines you’d like to share but are uncertain whether they’ll fit our policy, you can email Amanda Wyatt Visconti to check.