Liz Farrelly
Booth-Clibborn Editions
2001
265 pages
Hiya! I borrowed Zines, edited by Liz Farrley, from the Toronto Zine Library.
Two books about zines have already been profiled on this blog, Make a Zine!: When Words and Graphics Collide by Joe Biel and Bill Brent, and Stolen Sharpie Revolution by Alex Wrekk. Liz Farrelly’s Zines takes a different approach, from that of the previous authors, to the subject of self-publishing. The first two books profiled have been how-to guides for potential zinesters. Zines on the other hand prominently displays the final results of the zine-making process. Liz Farrelly worked as design editor for Booth-Clibborn Editions, a British publisher of books about fine art, design, and visual culture. In addition to her design work, Farrelly has written or edited a number of books and articles about design, and she also contributes occasionally to the design-focused Eye blog. In the book Zines, Farrelly takes the designer approach to her subject matter, which she treats as a form of visual culture rather than as a kind of literature or craft activity.
Zines is a visual book. It draws from a worldly selection of zines, some of which are well known and all of which are graphically interesting, and puts them on display. I am not familiar with most of the zines represented in the book, so I do not know if any of the images are altered from their original setting. Many of the images in Zines are coloured, while most zines are photocopy productions in black and white. Perhaps Zines gives black and white images a coloured background, perhaps Farrelly et. al. selected zines with more colourful imagery for their book. Out of the two zines that Farrelly featured that I am familiar with, the clip-art zine Craphound and the Canadian urban-exploration zine Infiltration, the images are in their original black and white.
Each page of Zines feature images, taken from handmade publications, that are unaccompanied by any relevant information. Instead of clouding the page with details, each new featured zine contains an index number, formatted as 01z, for example, which refers back to an entry in a guide near the front of the book. Each entry includes a publication cover and a short profile of the source zine. This guide is the only text in the book, it provides details about format, title, location and year of publication, and it also includes a brief statement about why the zine featured in the book. There is very little information about the materials, and while the inside cover of the book says that Zines is a “vivid yet analytical account of DIY publishing,” that statement is untrue. The book is a vivid representation of the innovative visual work that has appeared in zines over the past twenty years, but it is not analytic. It is instead a stream of disparate images, united in theme only by an underlying DIY ethos, without any information or statements regarding artist intention or image context (to name only two possible research concerns).
Zines is notable among zine books for taking a different approach to its subject matter. Most books I have seen discuss zines as a subcultural practice or as a kind of writing. Images from 89 different zines are represented in this book, often in full page displays. Some ‘zines’ included are actually handmade books, and Farrelly will often display these books as objects. The representation of the varying levels of the source material may serve to connect the images, in the reader's imagination, to their original format. The images displayed are decontextualized, and while in this book the images appear as an array of drawings, collage, and low-fi photographs, originally each image was likely set into a thematic system of publication content. To display the zine as an object, alongside its decontextualized visual content, may remind the readers of Zines of what the images came from.
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