Interesting interview w/ @jeffjarvis.bsky.social about his Object Lessons book, Magazine, which covers the history of the medium & draws on his experience working at People & launching Entertainment Weekly (& is one of my absolute favorite books on the topic): newbooksnetwork.com/magazine

"Zine...low or no-budget self-publications....Xeroxed by Lowlife Scum on company machines." Comic by Jim Ryan in issue 5 of John Marr's Murder Can Be Fun: archive.org/details/murd...

Virginia Faulkner had a hit novel at 21, ghostwrote the memoirs of a famous NY madam, & then had to figure out how to reinvent herself in her 40s. Looking forward to learning more about her in @neglectedbooks.com's upcoming virtual event (& new book!): www.eventbrite.com/e/virginia-f....

Happy New Year! We love sharing these pro-book posters from the Works Projects Administration Poster Collection in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest.

A lil’ printing primer. Two versions of a book. Same page count, but very different spine widths! How could this be? Is it magic?

Rewatched It's a Wonderful Life & somehow didn't remember that George Bailey's lifelong desire to see the world is fueled by a childhood subscription to National Geographic: www.youtube.com/watch?v=meGl...

This letter by Aaron Cometbus in a 1997 issue of Factsheet Five begins, "It seems like soon someone will hopefully be cataloguing fanzines from the last 20 years onto microfilm..." & then notes that he has about 3,000 zines in his collection. archive.org/details/fact...

Just discovered "Start a Zine!" an episode of the podcast Starting a Riot about the history & legacy Riot Grrrl. This episode features interviews w/ Ramdasha Bikceem & Mimi Thi Nguyen: play.cdnstream1.com/s/opb/starti....

Which canonical American authors are the public reading, and why? To find out, we analyzed library borrowing patterns for every author in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (1945 to the Present). Excited to share this new CHR paper & data! anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0... #CHR2025

Reading the new issue of The Observer this weekend, a UFO zine w/ really great writing. You can sign up for a free (!!!) subscription here: theobservermagazine.substack.com.

Article by Pagan Kennedy (Pagan's Head zine, more recently The Secret History of the Rape Kit) in a 1995 issue of Seventeen about making a zine covers everything from choosing a subject (she recommends yourself) to physically putting it together ("go to the art store & buy some layout grid boards").

Louis Bromfield was a prolific novelist but unable to maintain a journal. Below (undated but likely circa 1950s) is one of several examples in the Louis Bromfield Papers: "January 1, This is perhaps the tenth time I have attempted to keep a journal and nine times I have failed..."

Did you know several issues of Factsheet Five are available over at the @archive.org? The corpus isn't complete & the process of cleaning and OCR'ing images can be slow/painful, but the hope is that this allows more folks to read & research 80s-90s zine culture. archive.org/search?query...

Looking through old photos & rediscovered The Travels & Extraordinary Adventures of Bob the Squirrel (1847). (Note the amazing captions, somewhat impressionistic hand coloring, & illustration credit given to "Distinguished Artists.")

The Institute of Museum & Library Services has restored all previously canceled federal grants to libraries, following a ruling by a federal judge "Restoration of these grants is a massive win for libraries of all kinds in all states."

Up now on @literaryhub.bsky.social; an in-depth interview with small press publishers on what they do and how they do it, how they differ from commercial publishing in content & form, on funding, their impact on literary communities, & some excellent book recommends🎄 lithub.com/life-giving-...

When you see "photo albums" in an unprocessed UFO collection & you need to know...

Bonkers footnote in Roland Allen's The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper about lots of unused, shrink-wrapped Moleskines owned by Joan Didion going for more than $9,000 (an average of more than $800 per notebook) after her death:

In the early stages of working on a syllabus for a first-year zine history class & would be grateful for any recommendations for activities & assignments (beyond zine making, obviously). Thanks!

Family cookbooks, filled with handwritten notes, sometimes held together with rubber bands, tell the story of generations of homemakers. They are irreplaceable treasures. 🦃 Celebrate the cultural & family histories on their worn & stained pages ➡️ blog.archive.org/2024/09/30/v... #Thanksgiving

oh now we are talking about writing salaries? My contribution: No one* has ever made money from it. Don't romanticize the past. There are zillions of examples of destitution in the archives of your faves! *except a couple, here and there, randomly

Looking through Edward Hyland Scovill's baby book (SPEC.RARE.MMS.0420) & was struck by the November 19, 1903 entry written by his mother: "Teddy came home from school (Laurel Institute Primary) & said the children all helped to make some corn bread & then they ate it." She includes the recipe.

If you're interested in writing a book review for SHARP News @sharpnews.bsky.social, a new batch of available books is now live! docs.google.com/document/d/1.... & if there's something you'd like to review that's not on this list, feel free to contact me.

Exciting new acquisition for RBML's Margaret Armstrong holdings: Western Wild Flowers (1915), which Armstrong researched, wrote, illustrated, & designed the cover. This copy has a bookplate indicating that its owner (Elena R. Goodwin) received the book as a Christmas gift in 1916.

Excited for this virtual talk tomorrow afternoon on eighteenth-century print shops in British America:

New batch of book reviews up at SHARP News @sharpnews.bsky.social! Topics covered include the early modern European book trade, writing in Hindi, women in publishing, notebooks, Shakespeare folios, & the Yiddish press: sharpweb.org/sharpnews/.

Free zine picked up from a Nashville record shop: Jackie Shane, 1940-2019, #4 in the Nashville Queer History mini zine series.

In Nashville & got to take a tour at Hatch Show Print, which has designed & printed letterpress posters for music shows & other events since 1879.

📚 Academic Freedom: A Brief History📚 Check out this awesome event featuring Joan Wallach Scott and Alex Gourevitch, organized by AAUP - Brown! November 17, 7:30pm ET over Zoom Register via QR code in graphic @aaupbrownchapter.bsky.social

Amelia Acker: "Each chapter introduces data archiving processes that relate to the evolution of data sovereignty...: from magnetic tape + timesharing computer models from the 1950s,... to file structures + virtual containers in cloud-based information services over the past 40 yrs" — open access!

Chicago Public Library's budget cuts would mean losing HALF of the materials budget. It would mean losing 90 staff members. Cop budget's fine, though.

This is such an interesting article on the importance of Stephen Duncombe's Zines: Notes from Underground to zine history & scholarship: f5archive.org/duncombe/.

Highlight of this week: a new donation of more than 150 advertising cookbooks, mostly from the early and mid-twentieth century, largely in absolutely amazing condition 😍

My colleague Madison Good will be giving a virtual talk about artist Margaret Armstrong & the books we have designed by her on Wednesday. Details & registration: library.osu.edu/events/the-b...

Here's an important way to make a difference: become a public library board member! Get training and support from Libraries for the People. Library workers--get a friend or community member to sign up. 📚 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Beautiful Digital Edition of the Poet’s Pressed Plants & Flowers Is Now Online

Had the Star Trek original series scripts (SPEC.RARE.CMS.0017) out for a couple events recently & loved learning from a theatre grad student that the different colored pages indicate the additions / changes to a script.

Looking through Bela Koe-Krompecher's weekly planners in the Anyway Records collection (SPEC.RARE.0336) & came across this note he made about which zines were featured (Ben Is Dead, Bunnyhop, etc.) in the Columbus stop of the Kill Zinesters tour in July 1996.

!!! Interview at: f5archive.org/held/

Thrift store find in Athens, Ohio:

If your Monday night-in is looking a little dry, listen to me and my fantastic friend and colleague Barrye <3 luma.com/cyxih6zu

Interview with John R. Davis about his new book, Keep Your Ear to the Ground: A History of Punk Fanzines in Washington, DC: newbooksnetwork.com/keep-your-ea....

Somehow wasn't aware of the amount of college radio material on the Internet Archive until reading this post: blog.archive.org/2025/10/03/h.... Excited to see the related zines, but the flyers & playlists are so fun to look through, too.

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

If you happen to be in Columbus & would like to see sci-fi fanzines, pulp magazines, UFOlogy reports & publications, Star Trek scripts, etc. later this month! library.osu.edu/events/out-o....

"As punk received little mainstream media coverage by journalists who understood its nuances, the most comprehensive print record of its past is not made up of newspapers or magazines, but zines." contingentmagazine.org/2025/10/07/y...

Some highlights of a new cookbook donation that came in today:

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

The new issue of Billy McCall's Behind the Zines is so good & focuses on the (I think) endlessly fascinating topic of zine distribution. (Available on Etsy, if you want to get yourself a copy.)

Just realized that my article on zine distros came out a year ago this month! It looks like there's still free access to it via this link: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....