(no subject)
This Sunday just gone was the day of the London Zine Symposium. This is an annual event organised by Edd and Natalie of the zine ‘Last Hours’, where zinesters from all over the country and even overseas get together and ply their wares. I had a stall there for the second year running, and again it was fantastically busy, with thousands of people turning up to see what strange things the DIY presses of the area had produced this year.
I was in the smaller of the two rooms this time, between Ali McInnes of Ruskin Art School - who by coincidence has a piece in the forthcoming Attack!!!! 13 - and a woman on my left selling interesting-looking cards and illustration-based things whom I didn’t speak a word to all day. Not because I didn’t want to but because we were both so busy talking to the people in front of us.
I sold, altogether, more than 30 copies of different issues of Attack!!!! and of Two Heads part One. Just enough to cover my train fare - though that does mean the entire cost of production of each copy is a financial loss!! But it’s a great thing to have copies of them in so many new people’s hands after the event. One or two people were repeat customers too which was especially pleasing.
I traded Attack!!!! 8 (I chose that issue 8 for trades partly because it’s so strange that it’s a bit of a hard sell, but also because I want more people to see it) for about 7 or 8 other people’s publications - almost entirely people coming to me looking to trade because I couldn’t get away from the table all afternoon! - I’ll try to write up about everything I picked up over the weekend at some point.
Lots of other people’s reports of the Symposium, from most of which I appear to be dishearteningly absent:
Amelia's
Revolutionary Boredom
Llewtrah's Soapbox
Symbolic Forest (some good stuff said here)
Mister Trippy
Punk without Borders (I wasn't silent, I was talking the entire bloody time! I got sick of hearing myself talk about the zine!)
Emma Jane Falconer
If you stumble across this and have written up a blog entry you'd like added to the list, let me know.
Thanks to Oli and Yula for putting me up over the weekend yet again.
After London I got the train down to Brighton for a zine reading put on by Emma Jane (as in the last blog linked above) as part of Alex Wrekk’s UK tour. I’d planned to go down mostly because I was interested in the readings and was hopeful of meeting a few people away from our stall tables. But when I spoke to Emma at LZS, she said I could be added to the bill, so I also got to read a bit myself! It started with Alex reading a passage about zine readings from her book Stolen Sharpie Revolution, which was a clever touch and made me wonder how well I actually adopted them when I came to my own bit. Alex also read two passages from her Brainscan perzine. It’s good to get to hear things in people’s own voice and Alex has some good stories to tell.
It was my turn next and I read Ian’s piece from Attack!!!! 10 followed by my own written response to it. I also read the piece I’d just finished that day, which is going to be my entry for the competition (or Gorsedd) to be this year’s Bard of Glastonbury. The trials are next week so it was really great to have an audience to try the piece out on. I think there are some things I’ll change before the actual event but I think it went down okay. If anyone reading this was there, I’d appreciate any feedback you have to offer before I actually step onto the hallowed stage! I realised on the night that the event was taking place during Brighton Festival so I guess I’ve finally achieved an ambition of reading in Brighton Fringe.
The other readers were a guy called Toby who read from his ‘New Wave of Cut and Paste’ zine, he was very entertaining; Emma Jane herself who had a story about a man being stalked by a song (lovely idea) and a whole collection of memories of one of those teachers whose countless eccentricities stay with you for many years; and Robb from Aboveground Zine Library in New Orleans who told us some of his experiences setting up the library and of its survival of Hurricane Katrina. He was justly proud that a book fair he was involved in was one of the first things that a gave a lot of people in New Orleans some hope back after the disaster. Autonomic if you’re reading this I think you should go and check his library out. If I've understood correctly it's situated at the Iron Rail book store.
Thanks to Alex ( Duke Raoul) and Gemma for putting me up in Brighton!
Other things - Tiger Lillies, Bristol Art Book Event, Crimes of Passion graffiti exhibition, what’s going on with Two Heads. Please leave me a comment if you’d like to hear about any or all of these things in a future update.
I was in the smaller of the two rooms this time, between Ali McInnes of Ruskin Art School - who by coincidence has a piece in the forthcoming Attack!!!! 13 - and a woman on my left selling interesting-looking cards and illustration-based things whom I didn’t speak a word to all day. Not because I didn’t want to but because we were both so busy talking to the people in front of us.
I sold, altogether, more than 30 copies of different issues of Attack!!!! and of Two Heads part One. Just enough to cover my train fare - though that does mean the entire cost of production of each copy is a financial loss!! But it’s a great thing to have copies of them in so many new people’s hands after the event. One or two people were repeat customers too which was especially pleasing.
I traded Attack!!!! 8 (I chose that issue 8 for trades partly because it’s so strange that it’s a bit of a hard sell, but also because I want more people to see it) for about 7 or 8 other people’s publications - almost entirely people coming to me looking to trade because I couldn’t get away from the table all afternoon! - I’ll try to write up about everything I picked up over the weekend at some point.
Lots of other people’s reports of the Symposium, from most of which I appear to be dishearteningly absent:
Amelia's
Revolutionary Boredom
Llewtrah's Soapbox
Symbolic Forest (some good stuff said here)
Mister Trippy
Punk without Borders (I wasn't silent, I was talking the entire bloody time! I got sick of hearing myself talk about the zine!)
Emma Jane Falconer
If you stumble across this and have written up a blog entry you'd like added to the list, let me know.
Thanks to Oli and Yula for putting me up over the weekend yet again.
After London I got the train down to Brighton for a zine reading put on by Emma Jane (as in the last blog linked above) as part of Alex Wrekk’s UK tour. I’d planned to go down mostly because I was interested in the readings and was hopeful of meeting a few people away from our stall tables. But when I spoke to Emma at LZS, she said I could be added to the bill, so I also got to read a bit myself! It started with Alex reading a passage about zine readings from her book Stolen Sharpie Revolution, which was a clever touch and made me wonder how well I actually adopted them when I came to my own bit. Alex also read two passages from her Brainscan perzine. It’s good to get to hear things in people’s own voice and Alex has some good stories to tell.
It was my turn next and I read Ian’s piece from Attack!!!! 10 followed by my own written response to it. I also read the piece I’d just finished that day, which is going to be my entry for the competition (or Gorsedd) to be this year’s Bard of Glastonbury. The trials are next week so it was really great to have an audience to try the piece out on. I think there are some things I’ll change before the actual event but I think it went down okay. If anyone reading this was there, I’d appreciate any feedback you have to offer before I actually step onto the hallowed stage! I realised on the night that the event was taking place during Brighton Festival so I guess I’ve finally achieved an ambition of reading in Brighton Fringe.
The other readers were a guy called Toby who read from his ‘New Wave of Cut and Paste’ zine, he was very entertaining; Emma Jane herself who had a story about a man being stalked by a song (lovely idea) and a whole collection of memories of one of those teachers whose countless eccentricities stay with you for many years; and Robb from Aboveground Zine Library in New Orleans who told us some of his experiences setting up the library and of its survival of Hurricane Katrina. He was justly proud that a book fair he was involved in was one of the first things that a gave a lot of people in New Orleans some hope back after the disaster. Autonomic if you’re reading this I think you should go and check his library out. If I've understood correctly it's situated at the Iron Rail book store.
Thanks to Alex ( Duke Raoul) and Gemma for putting me up in Brighton!
Other things - Tiger Lillies, Bristol Art Book Event, Crimes of Passion graffiti exhibition, what’s going on with Two Heads. Please leave me a comment if you’d like to hear about any or all of these things in a future update.