It’s been over a week so there’s a big update this time with 234 zines added. See below for the list.

Item! Scanning the covers of all the A4, A5 and mini format zines has been completed and we’re within a gnat’s whisker of 2,000 items. This is fewer than I was expecting so I now estimate the total collection is about 3,000 zines, maybe 3,500. The last stretch consists of five boxes of comic book sized zines which I expect to be qualitatively quite different from recent uploads as these will mostly be printed with higher production values. That doesn’t lower the chances of oddness and weirdness of course!

Item! I’ve fixed the title sorting so it excludes prefixes like “The” and “A”. So A Virtual Circle should be down with the Vs and The Assassin and the Whiner is up with the As, just as they should be. This had been bugging me for a while and I found a bit of headspace to figure out the (actually quite simple) regex. Very pleasing. (If you ever want to teach yourself regular expressions I can highly recommend this tool.)

Item! My regex skills don’t stretch too far though. I’m very aware that accented characters in URLs are very buggy. One part of the site will generate them with the accent, another won’t. For example, if you click on Pete Dorée’s name you’ll get a 404 page, unless you replace the é with an e so pete-dorée becomes pete-doree and all will be right with the world again. This will be fixed.

Notable uploads

Really pleased to see issues of Rachel House’s Red Hanky Panky zines appear in the stacks. There’s a good chunk of queer zines in the collection, which I intend on highlighting eventually, and hers are one of my favourites. I also have fond memories of chatting with her in the garden at Caption. She’s still making work, recently producing a Colossive Cartography zine You Are Safe Here.

The 1994/95 Slab-O-Concrete catalogue promoted some memories. I believe this was the year Peter Pavement had a massive staff at UKCAC covered in zines and underground comics which would have blown my mind wide open.

I really like Luke Walsh’s cover to Munch. It perfectly represents an aesthetic of the era while being uniquely his. When I come to write all this up I expect there’ll be a lot about Luke, someone I never met in person but who played a vital role in the development of my awareness. One personal side-project is to make a book of all his work, just for my shelves. I think he’s one of the most important figures in British underground comics from that era but, like so many people in this archive, he’s fallen off the radar and there’s hardly anything about him online, just this profile on Lambiek. When all this is over I’d like to think I’ll dedicate myself to marking his legacy somehow. We’ll see.

Added the following titles: