If you're looking for something funny and/or hopeful, I'd recommend listening to this episode of ICYMI about Wikipedia: slate.com/podcasts/icy...

Rereading Izabeau Legendre's Margins in Motion: Towards a Political History of Zine Culture (2023), such an incredibly thoughtful & well researched work on zine history: queensu.scholaris.ca/server/api/c...

All of these people self-published at some point in their work: Margaret Atwood Stephen King Beatrix Potter Edgar Allan Poe Mark Twain Walt Whitman Virginia Woolf Benjamin Fucking Franklin might be your table neighbor at a zine fest if he was alive today.

Two of my favorite things in the Decorative Arts Center's exhibit of Ohio history in 250 objects:

Received the new Homocore Anthology. Really love the (growing?) trend of zines being reproduced in full. This comes closer to conveying what the original publications were really like & is infinitely more interesting & fun to read than the zine books that used to do just highlights & excerpts.

Visited the University of Findlay's Mazza Museum, the world’s largest collection of original artwork by children’s book illustrators. Definite highlight was seeing Stephen Gammell's mesmerizing / traumatizing artwork for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Looking at the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest known uses of "nerd" & lol'd at the 1971 example from the Observer, "Nerds are people who don't live meaningful lives."

OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚

Have been thinking a lot lately about the memoir boom of the 1990s & the explosion of personal zines during the same decade & wondering if there's a relationship between the two. They seem such separate worlds, but both point to an intense, growing interest in the stories of ordinary people.

No pop-ups, no paywalls, no ads. Our articles are free to read and free to republish: Subscribe to the Ohio Capital Journal newsletter today. ohiocapitaljournal.com/subscribe/

Just came across The Oyster; Where, How and When to Find, Breed, Cook and Eat (1861) in a dealer listing & am in love with the illustrations on the title page & frontispiece: archive.org/details/oyst....

Antique store find today: The Big Springs Country of the Missouri Ozarks (c. 1927), a promotional booklet encouraging tourism to southeast Missouri by highlighting scenic, rural views (but also drivable roads & access to phones). Came with a map showing the status of roads throughout the state.

While zines can’t compete with the reach of mass media, they are distributed for free or cheap and are difficult to censor. baltimorebeat.com/a-teaching-t...

Visited the (newish) Jefferson County Historical Society Museum in Victoria, MO. Incredible to look through a cookbook produced by the church my grandmother helped found. The woman there commented on how important old cookbooks are as records of the women in the area. ❤️

Seen in an antique mall in Pacific, Mo today (!!!): a 1917 poster produced by the US Food Administration aimed at encouraging Americans to "do their share" for the war effort by not wasting food.

In Pacific, Missouri today & visited various interesting places but probably the best was the local library that had an enormous paper mache whale, made by the branch manager, hovering over the adult fiction:

To put it in perspective. In the late 90s, we're talking a little over 100,000 books published each year in the US. 1,000,000 in 2009. 4,000,000 in 2025.

Having a weirdly great time reading How to Publish a Church Newsletter (1983): archive.org/details/bwb_...

It's that time! lithub.com/announcing-t...

Registration for the SHARPIES—our totally online Book History Festival—is now open and free for SHARP members! 📚😀 If you're not a member, it's easy to join (membership is between $55 and $100). The festival will take place July 7th-9th with events across time zones. events.zoom.us/ev/Ap9iEZwmC...

"Sorry, only 30 pages this issue; inflation strikes!" Note in the bottom corner of a page of issue 4 (1965) of the comics fanzine Slam-Bang (seen at Billy Ireland Cartoon Library).

Selected patterns from “Linoleum & Felt-Base: Spring Season - 1932” Sloane-Blabon Corp., New York Image: Avery Library Architectural Trade Catalogs Collection (Columbia Univ.) via @archive.org; archive.org/details/lino...

Just registered, this looks like an awesome event.

I wrote about old rap magazines, the fight for the future of hip hop’s past, and the impact the digital age has had on history, for @defector.com defector.com/lost-recipes

Visited the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library last week to look at early issues of Biljo White's Batman zine, Batmania. So beautifully illustrated! Originally free, issue 2 of the fanzine notes, "As Batmanians, we crusade not for monetary gain but for the enjoyment of seeing our ideas materialize."

Cover of the day

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If you happen to be on OSU's campus or nearby next Wednesday afternoon, please feel free to stop by RBML's open house of artist's books, visual poetry, & illustrations, curated by our student worker, Kate Jeffries. Info at: library.osu.edu/events/maril...

Looking through a postcard collection this morning:

Ad for a t-shirt available from the zine TV Collector, seen in a 1983 issue, says "My heart is in old TV." (I would absolutely wear this shirt.)

Just listened to this super interesting interview w/ Marc Masters about his book, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (apparently not new, but new to me 🙃): newbooksnetwork.com/high-bias

Fascism is here and yet we insist on continuing to make things. Keep creating. It's so important. Do not let the fascists colonize your imagination or curtail your creativity.

The cover of a 1944 zine, Arcadia: fanac.org/fanzines/FAP...

Talking to students this week about physically making zines & sharing some masters & printed zines of Nancy's Magazine so they can see the process of creation for this pub. Love the use of graph paper, white out, & glued bits of paper.

New reviews up at SHARP News @sharpnews.bsky.social's! Books on marginalia, letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., manuscript cookbooks, hybrid media, the small press the Jargon Society, & more: sharpweb.org/sharpnews/.

In case you too are interested in learning about how a collection of 3,000 pieces of hair jewelry & wreaths was built: www.morbidanatomy.org/events-ticke...

1968 letter from Gene Roddenberry to Sherna Comerford & Devra Langsam thanking them for their Star Trek fanzine which he says is "'required reading' for everyone in our offices." Reprinted in Spocknalia #3: fanac.org/fanzines/Spo...

Found a fascinating stitched repair on this 1825 pamphlet today: search.library.osu.edu/permalink/01...

So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/b... Gifted

Reading this 2012 interview w/ Osa Atoe about her zine Shotgun Seamstress & playing in punk bands & it's all so good, but I especially love that when she's asked if she sees herself as an archivist, she looks up the definition of the word: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The Librarians premiers on Independent Lens on Feb 9! @heykellyjensen.bsky.social has advice about how to support your local libraries: bookriot.com/how-to-suppo... + bookriot.com/gifting-with...)

A question for folks who make zines: Do you price your zine so you come out even or make a profit? Or are you even keeping track / does this matter? So curious about if & how this has changed over the past few decades. Thanks!

A near-complete run of Sassy for sale from Type Punch Matrix 👀 www.typepunchmatrix.com/pages/books/...

First issue (June 18, 1980) of Bill Landis' Sleazoid Express zine includes an amazing declaration in the top right-hand corner: "The largest circulation of anything of its particular type."

I love this photo of photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in her studio (1896). Look at all the posters for periodicals & little magazines! www.loc.gov/pictures/res...

Revisiting @marc-fischer.bsky.social's excellent Why Self-Publish Under Fascism today:

I'm guest editing the spring 2026 issue of The Recipes Project on "Personal Recipe Collections." Details at: therecipesproject.substack.com/p/cfp-person.... Please get in touch if you'd like to contribute!

This virtual event exploring the Digger movement of 1960s San Francisco & its tradition of radical print culture through ephemera looks awesome: www.bccbooks.org/event/digger...

I think a lot of us get hope wrong. Hope, I do not believe, is an emotion. In fact, hope makes space for lots of emotions to exist alongside it. You can DO hope scared, angry, sad etc... Hope doesn't find us. We make hope through action and struggle. It's a practice of living and is re-made daily.

ICYMI: How bookstores in the Twin Cities geared up for the march against ICE.