Why Anthony Rayson, Anarchist Grandpa, Sends Zines to Prison For years, the self-made publications have been relegated to art circles. But Rayson, in collaboration with DePaul, has found a new use for the retro medium.

You can usually find Anthony Rayson, 64, in the bright wood sunroom at the rear of his home in south suburban Monee. Through the window, there’s a sandbox and kids toys for Rayson’s grandson, when he visits. At a small table, he lays out apple slices for guests.

The room is stuffed with bookshelves, and the bookshelves are stuffed with folded sheets of white A4 paper making up thousands of homemade zines. Rayson pulls a few titles: Abolish All Prisons, Free the Slaves!, and finally, The Most Virtuous Vagina in the United States of America, grinning.

Zines, or self-made, low-budget literature — often booklets — were once a staple of underground publishing. But in the internet age, as self-publishing become quicker, cheaper, and boundless, they’ve fallen out of favor. These days, zines are mostly relegated to art circles.

Rayson, though, has found a practical use for the medium: For the past 20 years, he’s run the South Chicago ABC Zine Distro, a service that mails copies of zines from his extensive collection to incarcerated people. He also catalogs and sends out zines made from inside prisons, creating a network between prisoners across the country.

Rayson’s work, including multiple collaborations with incarcerated writers, is the inspiration for a current exhibition, Incarceration: Art, Activism, and Advocacy, on display at DePaul’s Richardson library through the first week of January.

Rayson wrote his first zine, The People’s Polar Express, in the 1970s. He’d just dropped out of his freshman year at Grinnell College in protest of US military action in Cambodia — or rather, in protest of a protest. “Grinnell students only struck for one day,” says Rayson. “So I said, ‘No, I’m staying on strike.’”

He hitchhiked around the country for two years, then returned to his parents’ home in Tinley Park, where he logged more than a hundred pages of creative writing. (He’s since gone back to school, graduating as valedictorian from Prairie State College in 1995).

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Rayson built the zine library he’d later use as a distribution center. At the time, he was a member of an anti-racist activist group. At one of their regional meetups, he had the idea to organize each chapter’s various literature into an anthology. “I realized, if it was going to happen, I was going to have to be the one to do it,” Rayson says.

All you need to distribute zines is a library of originals. From there, you can scan, fold, and staple copies in minutes. It didn’t take Rayson long to amass a huge collection, and soon, he wanted to share it. He posted ads in other zines and wrote letters to the editor of lefty publications like The Progressive and Mother Jones. But they went largely unanswered.

“It seemed so hopeful in the early ’70s,” says Rayson. “Everyone was pissed off, you know? ‘We’re gonna stop this shit!’ “But then everyone decided, ‘Oh, I’m just going to go disco.’”

But Rayson persisted, and soon, he found an unlikely readership — in state prisons.

Rayson had begun writing to people in correctional facilities at the behest of Sean Lambert, a zine author and prison rights activist who’d mentored Rayson through the ‘90s. At first, Rayson was looking for correspondents who could give him firsthand stories from prison to use in his own work.

But soon, he found that prisoners across the country wanted the zines he had, which were often political or instructional in nature (say, a primer on the Black Panther Party or a guide to staying healthy while incarcerated). In the letters he got back from prison, he found the same fire and urgency that he missed in his own ex-hippie peers. By the end of the 1990s, Rayson had collaborated on his first zine with a prisoner, Frank Atwood, called Decidedly Radical.

20 years later, Rayson gets roughly 80 to 100 new zine requests from prisons each week. Some people want a single title, others as many as Rayson can send. He and a single volunteer aim to fill each request within three weeks.