Imagine, if you will, a time when photocopiers had supplanted the lowly mimeograph machine, and were the leading technology, as important as many computer companies are today. There's a scene in the movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High where the students all sniff their papers, evidently to smell the mimeograph ink. Some people are nostalgic about this scent, some aren't. The Internet didn't yet exist in its current state and newsletters thrived. This was fertile ground for the zine to come about.

The word zine is short for magazine, but otherwise has little or nothing to do with them. For me, looking back, the idea that the eagerly anticipated fanzine, Sonic Death, for the group Sonic Youth, would be archived online would have been mindblowing. I think it was quarterly publication, but due to the vagaries of postal mail and the nature of zine publication, its arrival was always a pleasant surprise. Nevertheless, I think I always suspected they would be archived somehow.  

Also important was Sassy magazine. Sassy often featured zines that teens might otherwise have missed in their glossy pages. Sassy was a great microcosm of all things New York at the time, at least to my limited worldview. I’m not alone in noting their influence and the influence of their editrixes, Jane Pratt and Christina Kelly. In 2007, the book How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time came out.

Barnard has a list of library zine collections throughout the country, including the DePaul University zine archive featuring zines from the 1994 Underground Press Conference. The University of Iowa even has a vending machine called the Zine Machine.

•  Girl In a Band by Kim Gordon
• Whatcha Mean, What's A Zine? The Art of Making Zines and Mini-Comics by Mark Todd
• Zine subject search
• Zines at The New York Public Library
• Independent Publishing Resource Center