Unlike anything else in the Seattle Central library, the ZAPP Zine collection sits on the seventh floor. While most media is dominated by adults, this collection is dominated by the stories of teens. It contains everything from a zine written on toilet paper to guides for gardening. Walking through the isles, you can see little windows into the past and present, found in booklets that often document everyday life.
Compared to traditional forms of publishing, a zine is unique and individual. It can be shared as much or as little as possible, can be a story or set of drawings, a memoir, a guide, or whatever the author desires.
“The ethos of a zine is that it’s self created, that the author of it is determining what it looks like,” said Eliza Summerlin, Seattle Central Library’s teen services librarian. This also gives its authors creative freedom unlike any other form of media.
“I think the thing that’s most liberating about zines is that it happens completely outside of any type of overarching controlling system. You don’t need to go through a publisher…there’s not even any prescription about, like, what a zine can look like, or how it functions,” they said.
The individualized nature of zines has also prevented censorship that has become commonplace in libraries across the nation. Compared to books, newspapers or magazines which are published on a mass scale, the individualized nature of zines makes them virtually impossible to challenge on a large scale, owing to their small scale distribution.
“You know, back in the day, you would get zines at your local record store, or maybe you would sign up for a mailing list from somebody from another part of the country who is writing about riot girl music, and there weren’t those bands where you lived. And so you signed up for the mailing list and you got it in the mail,” they said. “You’re not going to a bookstore. You’re not going to somewhere where you’re purchasing it. It’s more of a person to person way of communicating creativity or whatever information it is that you want to share.”
And unlike traditional publishing, which has few teen authors, zines have many. There are even a few child authors. “One of the cool parts of my job is that I’m a judge for the Washington State zine competition for the youth categories, and it’s kids who are from kindergarten through high school, and it’s so cool to see what different people write about and care about,” said Summerlin.
The collection almost acts as an archive of sorts, helping to document the past. Unlike other forms of media, which were formal and often didn’t show the everyday lives of real people, zines offer us a glimpse into the past, especially for the queer community that often had its contributions left out of traditional media.
“There are so many queer and trans scenes here from like the 90s and the early 2000s and, if you were, if you were a trans guy in 1995 your doctor was not talking to you about hormones, you didn’t know about top surgery. You probably didn’t know anybody else like you. And so these zines were ways to share important medical and personal information that just weren’t accessible in other places,” they said. This also extended to topics outside of the mainstream more broadly. “A lot of it [zine culture] is taboo topics that nobody really wanted to talk about at the time, and now they’re becoming a little bit more mainstream. We’ve got gay culture. We’ve got secret teenage revolution,” said librarian Karly Williams.
Even as the internet continues to eat away at print media, zines offer something that the internet can’t. “I think that the way that people are doing, kind of like DIY, exploration and publishing, has shifted to the internet more, but I think there will always be zines and zine makers. and [the internet] it’s a little less personal, because, you can go to somebody’s blog, you can kind of troll something, you know, like, you could be like, oh, I want to learn about socialism. But when you physically give something that you have put time and energy into and then grabbed it from somebody else and read it, consumed it, there’s a tangibility there that you just don’t get with the internet,” said Williams. “It’s more community based.”
