ZINES, vol.1, n°1, 2020
Amateur publishing can take place in a professional environment. This is the case, for example, when non-professional publishers create a journal to promote their ideas. Before the era of the presentday commercial peer-reviewed journal industry, most academic journals published by national or international Sociétés savantes were fanzine-like publications in their first age. Antipode, the radical geography journal, was created by undergraduate students in 1969 and the first issues were mimeographed with cut and paste editing that would become more familiar half a decade later with DIY punk zines. When Luc Boltanski and Pierre Bourdieu launched Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales in 1975, they had no experience in self-publishing; Boltanski confessed afterwards that he was directly inspired by Schtroumpf, a French comics fanzine published at that time, to create a “fanzine dedicated to sociology”¹. Similarly, Gérôme Guibert, MariePierre Bonniol and myself capitalized on our decade of fanzine-publishing experience to launch Volume!, the French journal of popular music studies, in 2002, thinking that “this should not be more difficult than to publish a clean fanzine”². Innovation in academic research takes place in shadowed areas and academic publishers must support innovation by providing efficient ways of dissemination. Over the last two decades, publishers have steadily transferred the editing process to the hand of researchers, primary producers of scientific knowledge: editing maps, editing figures, editing text, filling templates, formatting bibliography, etc. Publishers have abandoned the time-consuming (hence costly) process of editing, to become, almost exclusively, printers-binders-sellers, garnering high profits in the end. And often trying to retain the copyright on research they have not funded.
Fanzines are one of the expressions of amateur creativity, of the do-it-yourself ethos. ZINES journal wants to explore the ingenuity of amateurs through the publications they design, shape and publish. At the dawn of the 1930s, these publications were in the form of small mimeographed booklets published in the United States. Nowadays, they come in many forms: screen-printed, photocopied, risographed, digitally printed or even exclusively online. They have in common the tendency to ignore the rules of art, standards, and habits in order to allow a renewal of means of expression. Often, they come from the working classes or minorities and, at least partly, tell their stories. ZINES hopes to be part of this history of margins, most members of the editorial committee having been involved for many years in the world of fanzines or webzines. We hope to retain the spirit of fanzines by limiting as much as possible the rules of this journal to those we deem essential: we hope this journal will be academic in its editorial rigor, but not necessarily in its form. All papers published herein are copyleft; they will be released online for free within two years after their publication in print. We are committed to this short embargo because we are lovers of paper, and ZINES must exist in printed form first. Zinesters, zine librarians, acazinesters are all welcome to submit and share their ideas, experiences, thoughts, etc. about amateur publishing. Samuel ETIENNE
¹ BOLTANSKI Luc (2008), Rendre la réalité inacceptable, Paris, Demopolis, p. 20. ² ETIENNE Samuel (2019), Bricolage radical. Génie et banalité des fanzines do-it-yourself. Tome 2, Strandflat, Les presses du réel, p.
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