After catching last week’s punk show at the San Francisco Public Library, I stopped by the zine-making tables set up right outside the auditorium. For the uninitiated, zines are essentially little self-published, printed, or photocopied magazines. As someone who hung out in coffee shops in the late 90s and early 2000s, I always enjoyed reading the various zines that would sometimes appear, usually sitting in a stack right next to the alternative weeklies. I'd flip through the pages, which were usually a mix of angst and hyperlocal neighborhood stories. Thinking about this reminded me of a specific collection in the San Francisco Public Library that I'd been meaning to check out: the Little Zine Library.
I found out the Zine Library was in the Special Collections room on the sixth floor. When I walked in, I discovered I couldn’t just browse all the zines on a display or set of shelves. The person at the desk handed me a pencil and a printed catalog, and I would need to write down the names of the zines I wanted to look at. I flipped through the listings, writing down titles that caught my eye. I didn't come looking for anything specific, so I gravitated toward zines from San Francisco and Portland in the 90s and 2000s. Once I'd filled out my list, another staff member took it, disappeared into the back somewhere, and returned about ten minutes later carrying boxes of zines to my table.
Sitting there with those boxes was a dramatic contrast to the digital present. Each zine was a physical object that someone had assembled by hand. Creators handwrote or typed every sentence onto the page. The formats varied wildly with different page sizes, paper textures, binding methods, and cover art. Some zines changed their entire design and format between issues, as if the creator had become a different person since the last one. In an era where every corporate logo and typeface has converged into the same sans-serif font and bland color palette, these zines were artifacts from a world that wasn’t so visually homogeneous.
Reading through them was like opening a time capsule from a specific neighborhood and year. One zine recounted a specific house show in Portland, and how all of their friends wanted to move there after attending the show. Another zine cataloged places to have sex in public in San Francisco, the kind of piece that would never appear in a mainstream publication. The writing here was unfiltered because there was no filter to pass through. It was just someone with something to say and access to a photocopier.
Something about reading their typed or handwritten words on paper made it all feel very personal. These were the joys and struggles of a real individual. I was sitting with someone's physical creation, holding the same pages they had once cut and stapled together. Even though the writing wasn’t always spectacular, it was very engaging. The words had more weight to them when they weren’t something I would just scroll past in an infinite feed.
One of my favorite finds was an early 90s hip hop magazine called “The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine.” The writers were discussing albums like Warren G's Regulate and Biggie's Ready to Die just after those albums were released. This was before anyone had declared them classics and there were no YouTube tastemakers telling them what to think. The takes were much more raw and without fluffy language. Apparently DJ Shadow had written for this magazine at some point.
The Little Zine Library is worth the trip for anyone tired of the infinite slop feed. These zines are proof that people once made things simply because they wanted to make them, even if there were no big brand deals or ability to monetize them. Every page feels intentional and unique. The library keeps them carefully preserved, waiting in boxes for someone who wants to revisit this time period.
