521 self published and small press zines, collected by Meredith Stern since the 1990s.

From Meredith Stern:

“I attended punk shows in the early 1990s in West Philadelphia, put on by a collective of DIY punks called the Cabbage Collective. They inspired my best friend Brice White and I to create DIY spaces in New Orleans, including a bookstore called Crescent Wrench, and Nowe Miasto, a punk house and music venue. Hundreds of zine creators stayed in these spaces and we all traded our zines. People wrote about their moral ethics, music reviews, shared gardening info, and their personal life stories. We traveled across country and traded them, found them at alternative bookstores and record shops. Zines were a space for women, queer, and non-binary punks to write about feeling marginalized.

I discovered feminism through zines including Nomy Lamm’s I’m So Fucking Beautiful zine, and Cindy Crabb’s Doris. A few zines which were influential in documenting racism and classism within punk was Mimi Thi Nguyen’s Slant and Evolution of a Race Riot. Adee Roberson’s Finger on The Trigger and Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress include history, their personal stories, and highlight Black punk icons.
We shared DIY information of all sorts. Most punk houses had a copy of Hot Pants- Do It Yourself Gynecology and Take Back Your Life. These zines inspired Peek Inside, a zine that accompanied a touring group of folks teaching punks how to do DIY cervical exams. Well Fed- Not an Animal Dead by Graham Burnett included simple vegan recipes and introduced me to permaculture. Shelley Jackson wrote A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance as a primer for punks to learn basic, routine bike repair.

Zines were a place to write about trauma and connect with others who might share our pain. In Rice Harvester number 13, Greg writes about being shot while riding his bike home in New Orleans. Fly Orr’s comic Zero Content was featured in Slug and Lettuce, and visualizes protesters dealing with violent police officers, punks at parties, and the sadness of friends who died from overdoses. Moe describes being pregnant in Alaska while working as a commercial fisherwoman in Second Set Out.

Many people who wrote zines continue to live and work with a DIY ethic. Several zine writers are members of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, including Icky Apparatus, who wrote Nosedive. He gets to the heart of zine culture in issue 11 when he wrote: ‘…my belief in our house is a belief in people, revolution, in a different way to live. It is faith in collective and willingness and patience in inconsistency and compromise. Because it is so basic, this house, this living, this way of living, yet it so out of context for most people’s lives. My love for my housemates is varying and complex but it is at its best on the surface and foundation like too. It is belief in the collective as an organic living thing, hope in change and faith in friends.'”