Shattered Wig Review on the other hand is printed on a boxy kind of shaped paper, nearly square but a little longer than it is tall and bound sheet by sheet with no fold. It’s an anarchic collection of poetry, cartoons and alt-art. First published in 1990 and issued on a semi-annual basis, the issues I saw started with #17 from 1999. It’s squarely in the punk vein in terms of what they choose to print and how they present material, but doesn’t have much connection to music. It’s primarily a literature zine but tends to print highly experimental poetry and illustration. There’s lots of free verse and a fair amount of poetry that relies as much on formatting as on language to function.

A standout was a poem by Glans T Sherman about the president having goat testicles transplanted onto his body. Both the author’s name and the poem itself were amusing in a cheeky, mildly subversive way. I also liked this entry, “Our Mr. Brooks,” by one George Freek reproduced here without permission.

Both of these zines remain in active publication although they have moved online by this point. It’s likely very hard to find any of the older issues as it seems like they printed runs in the low hundreds, but its possible they’re out there if you’d like to have a look yourself.

I also read several issues each of Lower East Side Librarian Winter Shoutout, We’ll Never Have Paris, and Croq. These are all fairly long running zines with a history starching back into the mid to late 90’s, with the exception of Croq which was first published in the early naughties.

Croq is a zine all about crafting – its inaugural issue was made for a craft fair and is very much directed at the craft community. It contains various essays on the craft scene, often with a rebellious or contrarian bent, reprints of articles from older craft zines and new material on crafting. It’s fully loaded with DIY instructions on things like selling crafts online, making god’s eyes, and less strictly crafty things like singing or cooking a vegan Thanksgiving. I think it’s still running and is probably fairly easy to get ahold of considering it’s relatively recent and has been picked up by some circulation companies. This would be a cool thing to have for any DIY aficionado.

Lower East Side Librarian Winter Shoutout in contrast is probably almost impossible to find anywhere. It’s also still in production but generally only around 130 copies go out in a year. It’s every inch the classic image of the zine, pasted together prints which are then Xeroxed and stapled. It contains deeply personal writing that borders on a journal style publication and – most interesting to me – a yearly reading list. There are some submissions, but the vast majority of the material in this zine is by one person, a librarian located in NY. It is about her life. It’s printed fairly cheaply and most issues look like your basic folded and stapled A4, straight from the copier.