Zines, Then and Now

When the Editor-in-Chief of the newly-launched That Glow invited me to contribute a column way back in 1999, she frowned when I referred to the glossy pregnancy-motherhood-working woman site as a zine.

"On-line magazine," she corrected briskly. I nodded, pretending to understand, as I pretended to understand most things technology-related back in the day. Didn't the "zine" mean magazine? I knew about zines! gurl.com was funny and smart and progressive, decidedly sex-positive, and chickclick was edgy and hip and represented third wave feminism - it even sponsored the first Lilith Fair! 

At That Glow, we were also all about women - but we were glossy, not grungy - upscale and sleek. We were going to run ads, pay writers well, 

and - 

 Well. The fact that you probably don't recognize the name - or perhaps mistook it for one of the many sound-alike sites that are now, in 2026, gorgeously thriving, tells the tale. The editor was bright and ambitious and well-connected, but decidedly ahead of her time. I was sorry, but not surprised, when our "online magazine" slipped beneath the surface of the roiling sea of the newly dubbed "world wide web." (Recognize that www, y'all?) 

For me, launching a writing career in the mid-nineties, "publishing" on the internet seemed iffy, experimental, kind of cool - but also more than likely a waste of time, sort of like those semi-pro art shows people would throw together in someone's garage. A lot of work, one fun night of hope, pot, and cheap white wine, and then…nothing. Gone. After all, how would anything "posted" on the internet be circulated? How would it be seen? How would it be archived? Yes, people under forty years of age. These were actual questions we asked ourselves. The concept of words, images and (God help us) videos circulating for all eternity on the internet was beyond our feeble ken.

 Even with print magazines folding all around us, even with copyeditors and even editors being laid off wholesale, even with writers being pushed from staff to stringer, the money - and the glamour - was still in print publication. I'd been a columnist for Buzz Magazine until it folded abruptly in 1998, but no worries. I had regular gigs writing crime, disease, and celebrity scandal for the Big Seven women's mags - Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, et al. I'd just move on to the next juicy gig! 

 (That sound you hear is everyone who was actually making a living writing in the nineties spitting coffee all over their computers.) 

So - zine, magazine - for me, it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. Zines were an online phenomenon, some new flash in the pan that was cool and fun but probably destined to fail. 

 But I was late to the party. What I thought was new was just an online version of the do-it-yourself rags that had been around since the thirties, when sci-fi fans put together little "fan magazines" - called zines even then - to discuss their favorite characters. The very first of these may have been Allen Glasser's The Planet (July 1930), distributed to The New York Scienceers, a sci-fi fan club. In an article for Carter ARTicles, Carolyn Croley writes that art and design zines were first created in the early 20th century, focusing on Dada and surrealism. What these journals had in common is that they were small, hand-produced, carefully curated, and often at a variance with the tastes of mainstream culture. 

These early works were seminal, but their authors were by no means the first to self-publish. Tristram Shandy was self-published by Laurence Sterne in the late 1700s. A hundred years later, Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. Self-publishing was often undertaken by writers who couldn't connect with a publishing house. This route was quite respectable, and the term "self-published" didn't really have a stink on it until the advent of "vanity publishing" in the early 1900s. 

 The North American Review was founded in 1815, and is still going strong. NAR was first produced on letterpress, but by the fifties offset printing had taken over. Similar specialized literary journals, often called "lit mags" or "littles," proliferated in the 1960s with the advent of mimeograph machines. Access to photocopiers in the 1980s produced another wave of journals, and by the end of the 20th Century there were thousands of little magazines being produced across North America, some financed independently, some supported by colleges, foundations - and even by the government. My first poetry sale was to a tiny photocopied journal whose name is lost to history but that paid me fifty bucks! In 1988 dollars! 

 (So…if a poem sold for fifty bucks forty years ago, I guess now they must sell for - what? A thousand? Ten thousand? Hahahhahahahahhhahahahahahha. Sorry, poets. Just know I'm laughing with you, not at you.) 

 These early lit journals were a bit more polished than hand-produced zines. Zines were more ragged, more amateurish, more raw. Typed by hand, sometimes even hand-written, often mimeographed, then stapled together by hand, zines were integral to pop culture. In the seventies, long before most American households had a computer, amateur mags were spreading the word about street style, fashion, and music, perhaps picking up where those early art and design zines left off. Zines were particularly relevant to the punk scene. Punk - the zine - debuted in New York in 1976 with a caricature of Lou Reed on the cover, and helped popularize the moniker "punk."

 Similarly, small self-produced "underground" newspapers rose to prominence in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, mostly associated with the counterculture. As the Vietnam war ended, most of these disappeared. Plus ça change, as Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849. Plus c'est la même chose. Yeah.

 What he said. 

Print reading matter still outsells digital by a wide margin, and that seems likely to obtain for some time to come, but e-reading has undeniably changed the game. Today, the Substack and Mailchimp platforms distribute what are essentially e-zines, though the lines between magazine, newspaper, newsletter, blog, website and zine have become a bit blurred. Paper zines are still around, too - Paper Pushers Print Shop in Seattle stocks hundreds of tiny, hand-produced zines. Los Angeles has an annual zine festival, as do San Francisco, Toronto and Chicago. Other cities have a big zine component to their comic book festivals. Zines have evolved, but they are still around, online and in print. Why not check a few out?

Anna Scotti is the author of a young adult novel, Big and Bad, that won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People. Though primarily a mystery writer, she has published poetry widely and was awarded numerous awards and honors for her collection, Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, and the poems within. Anna's novel-in-stories, It's Not Even Past, went out of print shortly after publication, but will be re-released in October - details to come! Learn more at www.annakscotti.com.