From the Duke News Service

August 1, 2001

Ordinarily, a person searching for the irreverent, self-published products known as 'zines' would have to go to an alternative bookstore, a music store or a hip diner.

Now, these counterculture materials also can be found at a more scholarly location: the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library at Duke University.

Archivists at the library's Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture began acquiring zines by women and girls last year and already have cultivated what is considered one of the leading collections of its kind in the United States.

"We're definitely ahead of the curve," said Cristina Favretto, center director. "Libraries are just starting to recognize the value of these materials and the importance of collecting them."

The acquisition of zines is an emerging trend at libraries nationwide. In addition to Duke, a number of institutions have begun to collect, preserve and make zines available to scholars, such as Michigan State University, Washington State University, Bowling Green State University and DePaul University.

Defining the term "zine" is no easy task, but zines generally have several features in common, Favretto said. For instance, most have names that are either unconventional or outright eccentric, such as Rumpshaker, Other People's Mail and Snack Bar Confidential.

Zines are low-budget publications, Favretto added. They are driven by the editorial passions of their creators and usually attack or parody mainstream ideas. What's more, they focus on almost every aspect of culture, from music reviews, to fashion, to sexually transmitted diseases to the way men whistle at women or make catcalls.

"They're extremely diverse," Favretto said. "You might have one in which a woman agonizes about being overweight and another in which a woman celebrates it."

Duke's Sarah Dyer Zine Collection is unusual in that it focuses on zines by women and girls, Favretto said. Other archives specialize in comic zines, music zines, science-fiction zines, or cultural criticism zines, for example. Still others limit their focus to a geographic area.

The collection at Duke was established last fall after an e-mail exchange between Favretto and Dyer, the editor of Action Girl Newsletter, founded in 1992 and widely recognized as the first zine to review and network only female-published, underground literature.

As editor of Action Girl, Dyer built an extensive zine collection over the years by soliciting other such publications with offers to review them in exchange for small ads. The zines came flooding in, as the collection attests. In 2000, Dyer decided to move to a smaller house and subsequently had no room for her thousands of zines, so she went online to find them a new home.

When she came across Duke's web site on the Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, she figured she had a fitting repository. She dashed off an e-mail to Favretto, who wrote back immediately, saying she was interested.

The university's Sarah Dyer Zine Collection contains 1,500 individual zines and nearly 1,000 titles. It also includes comprehensive records of Bitch and Bust, two of the most established women's zines now published as slick glossies.

Favretto approached the editors of Bitch and Bust last year and secured donations of each publication's earliest editions, fan mail, business records, original artwork, layout sheets and other production materials. They show the evolution of women's zines, Favretto said.

Local zines also are among Duke's holdings. They include Attagirl by Durham resident Sandra Stringer and the mini-comic Strange Growths by Jennifer Zervakis, a research associate at the university's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

When Dyer's collection arrived at Duke by mail, Bingham Center assistant archivist Amy Leigh spent several months reviewing the zines and entering them into a database. Now, they can be accessed by title and subject.

"Zines are what we call 'fugitive literature,'" Leigh said. "Many of the ones in our collection were short-lived and had runs of as few as 50 copies. People might collect them, but when they move they mostly throw them away. Once they're gone, they're gone."

Preservation efforts underway at libraries across the country are affording zines greater longevity. At Duke, they are stored in acid-free folders, in acid-free boxes, in a climate-controlled environment. So while their pages will need to be turned carefully, most are expected to last 200 to 300 years.

Asked why libraries should collect zines, Favretto said they tell us a great deal about the spirit of the age. They shed light on young people's thoughts and preoccupations, and while they can be whimsical, they have a documentary quality unlike anything else, she added.

"Zines became popular in the 1980s because of easy access to copy machines, but also because a lot of people couldn't relate to the high-minded themes in publications like The New Yorker and The New Republic," Favretto said.

Duke holds a writers camp for middle-school students each summer. On one of the days, the students are given a tour of the Special Collections Library, where a range of materials is set out on tables. Among them are 19th-century letters, historic advertisements, aged diaries and, of course, samples of zines.

"The students gravitate toward the zines," Favretto said. "They are very accessible. It looks like something they can do."

People in search of zines may have noticed in recent years that it's getting harder to find them. That's because they are in fact beginning to wane in popularity. But don't despair, Favretto said. The next generation of zines, "e-zines," is thriving on the Internet.

[back to main news page]