Another 100 A5 zines added - see below.

I had a bit of a breakthrough with the site this week. It’s by no means perfect but all publisher and contributor names are now linked to archive pages. So if you click on, say, Paul Schroeder’s name you’ll see a list of the zines he’s published followed by details of those same zines interpolated (?) with zines he’s a contributor to (at the moment that’s Peter Rigg’s Butler family saga).

I’ve filled out the contributor field for most of the last couple of hundred zines and will do so for the rest of this pass, then go back and re-do the first 1400 or so. So hopefully we’ll have a decent index of the people and publishers involved by Christmas? We’ll see.

Entering zines into a database is like trying to cram round cats into square holes. They intrinsically resits a taxonomy, and that’s what’s so wonderful about them, and yet I need to have a taxonomy which is of course constrained by the straightjacket of the software I’m using not being written by a zine archivist.

I’d assumed publisher and creator would be the same thing, and they often are, except when they’re not, so they need to be different. But then it looks a bit weird when you have someone like Jeremy Dennis whose long list of zines mirrors her long list of contributions to zines, with a few contributions to other people’s zines buried in there. It should really be one list, and it probably will be in time. But for now it’s two.

Anyway, I feel like all the small iterations over the last month suddenly amounted to something significant this week, which is nice. There’s a lot of fixes to do (the contributor pages are generated in a rather cack handed way that fails quite spectacularly with certain names, and I’m not happy with the layout) but it’s good enough to launch to the pub-table’s worth of people visiting this site right now, and I have plenty of time.

Notable uploads

Inkling 10 sees this anthology enter its imperial mode. So much good stuff in here. A great snapshot of British indie comics in 1993.

Typewriter 5 is a bonkers package which I have no idea how I’m going to scan. It’ll probably have to be photographed or maybe videoed. Each strip is literally a strip of paper, all folded into a package held together with brass paper fasteners.

Added the following titles: