Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines

This offering compiled by Joseph (modern and contemporary art, Columbia Univ.) and Sawyer, a photography curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is a visual archive of many self-published, low-budget, and low-circulation printed zines created from 1969 to the present. Zines are essentially homemade magazines distributed within subculture circles, an alternative to mainstream printing. Readers of this book will discover a kind of analog social media, where members of countercultures and subcultures communicated through mimeographed and xeroxed printouts. Chapters in the book are arranged chronologically by time period, each including an essay providing a context of the era, followed by a scanned archive of zine covers and pages from that time. The themes of contributors’ essays range from LGBTQIA+ perspectives to punk subcultures to xerography. Note that some of the zines in this book feature nude or graphically shocking images—including staged crime scene photographs in the zine Redrum—which might place the book in a niche market. An interesting history within the medium of the zine is the latter-20th-century print revolution caused by xerox technology, invented by Chester Carlson in the 1930s.