Of the 569,090 books in Gould Library, the vast majority bear the marks of officialdom: they’re professionally written, edited, bound, and distributed. But one new collection elevates another kind of publishing, what Special Collections Librarian Jackie Beckey calls “vernacular production”: independent zines created outside of mainstream publishing channels and often distributed for free.
Curated by filmmaker Craig Baldwin, who for decades has run the alternative art venue Other Cinema in San Francisco’s Mission District, the collection is made up of 219 zines from the 1980s to the present. Including titles like Fierce Femme (“Women / Bicycles / Culture”), Funky Butt, Sun Ra Research, We Are the 99%, and Das Gefühl, they arise from activist movements, the punk scene, queer culture, the arts, and beyond.
“A lot of these publications capture underrepresented and marginalized voices, and this kind of ephemeral collection is where you capture that hidden history,” says Beckey. She looks forward to having these first-person, unofficial perspectives available for student use. “When we think of zines as academic sources in an academic library, we start to break down the binary of scholarly voices and the lower popular voice.”