Double-Wide Zine

The point of my last post Stuffed Grape Leaves was to start to create content for a small black-and-white-copy-machine zine. If you’re wondering what a “zine” is, well, you’re not alone.  There doesn’t seem to be any clear consensus on the definition of zine, but, happily, there doesn’t seem to be any debate about it either: just discussions and conjectures. An enjoyable read about this is on the Brooklyn College Zine site .  I also like what the New York Public Library has to say on the subject. Personally, I think of a zine as a book made on a copy machine from a single sheet of paper, which is then folded into book form. There’s so much that I wanted to put in this little book that I decided it needed to be made out of two sheets of standard size copy paper. I grabbed content, as well as some of the comments, from my last post, and added in a bit more. The two pages had to be laid back-to-back and glued along one edge. It’s easy to glue them together wrong, so I made put dotted lines, which define where the paper is cut, in the part that will be the middle of the book. This proved to be a good landmark for me. If you look close you can see the dotted line above the word Stuffed.  The photo at the top of this post show what the pages look like after being glued together. Here’s a close up of the dotted line and the second page, still barely visible, and it disappears completely when the cut is made. Next, the pages are flipped over, and the edges are folded towards the center. Flipped over again, cut on the dotted line… …then opened into an open book that needs to be closed. One again, here’s a link to a whole collection of directions on how to do this.   Okay, so I made a bunch of these. It felt good. But then I happened to come across an itty bitty book by David Massengill, that Sarah, from Caffe Lena, had given to me after David had performed at Lena. (BTW, if you click on David’s link his music will immediately start playing. This is something that usually irritates me, but not in this case. His music is completely enchanting…as are his little books.)   This book stands just about three inches high, and, though the structure is a different variation of the one that I’ve shown, it’s still of the put-through-the-copy machine-and-start-folding genre. This book was written and drawn with such a light, clear hand that I was envious…not an emotion that I like, but one that I will allow to influence the next little zine I make. Now I’m going to go have a listen to David’s music.