behold! a zine fair!
Jul. 10th, 2025 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frandroidSo even though I've been selling zines for 25 fucking years now, there are two big zine things I have never done until now:
1) put out my own zine
2) organize a zine fair.
Amusingly, the second item is happening before the first one. I had thought about organizing a small bar-hosted zine fair for a while (Cut 'n Paste in Toronto used to be held at Sneaky Dees (a sizeable punk-ish bar with two floors), and the first zine fair I visited, Generous Margins, was held at the Sugar Refinery). I long have had a bar-owning friend who is open to the idea. Then last fall, Canada's largest fair, Canzine, was cancelled because the guy running it and Broken Pencil got cancelled for a second time in a few years, this time for being a rabid, lying, libelling, fabulating Zionist. So he decided to just destroy his two indie institutions. Then this spring I learned that SOMEONE ELSE had held a bar fair (which I missed by a day), so now I was like IT'S ON!! This summer I was talking to a new zine friend about it, and he told me that he and some other people were getting together to organize a new zine fair, to ostensibly replace Canzine. So I have joined this collective, we have held a few organizing meetings so far, and it looks like this thing is serious!!! I'm very excited. It's going to be on a smaller scale than Canzine (it had between 150 and 200 vendors, depending on the year/venue--we could probably cram 80 in our venue but others are a bit more conservative/chill/insecure about it, so we're looking at 56 to 70. It's going to be an application fair so we'll see how many people we decide to let in and possibly adjust the number of tables in consequence.
We were discussing whether to have sponsors or not (not soliciting them, but even just allowing them to ask for the privilege), and while I was in the "sure, we could do more things with more money" mindset, one of the collective members, incidentally the person who had organized that spring bar zine fair, was like "if they're not selling zines, even if they're an indie business, they're still a business trying to use our reputation to make more money". I'm not absolutist like that (I'm fine with indie book publishers/bookstores paying hundreds of dollars for a table if they feel like it), I dig this anarchist/zine purist take and I feel like we're in good company. (We're going to have a notice for potential sponsors to write to us to ask to sponsor, but it looks like we'll be picky. At most we'd probably have three sponsor tables anyway.)
1) put out my own zine
2) organize a zine fair.
Amusingly, the second item is happening before the first one. I had thought about organizing a small bar-hosted zine fair for a while (Cut 'n Paste in Toronto used to be held at Sneaky Dees (a sizeable punk-ish bar with two floors), and the first zine fair I visited, Generous Margins, was held at the Sugar Refinery). I long have had a bar-owning friend who is open to the idea. Then last fall, Canada's largest fair, Canzine, was cancelled because the guy running it and Broken Pencil got cancelled for a second time in a few years, this time for being a rabid, lying, libelling, fabulating Zionist. So he decided to just destroy his two indie institutions. Then this spring I learned that SOMEONE ELSE had held a bar fair (which I missed by a day), so now I was like IT'S ON!! This summer I was talking to a new zine friend about it, and he told me that he and some other people were getting together to organize a new zine fair, to ostensibly replace Canzine. So I have joined this collective, we have held a few organizing meetings so far, and it looks like this thing is serious!!! I'm very excited. It's going to be on a smaller scale than Canzine (it had between 150 and 200 vendors, depending on the year/venue--we could probably cram 80 in our venue but others are a bit more conservative/chill/insecure about it, so we're looking at 56 to 70. It's going to be an application fair so we'll see how many people we decide to let in and possibly adjust the number of tables in consequence.
We were discussing whether to have sponsors or not (not soliciting them, but even just allowing them to ask for the privilege), and while I was in the "sure, we could do more things with more money" mindset, one of the collective members, incidentally the person who had organized that spring bar zine fair, was like "if they're not selling zines, even if they're an indie business, they're still a business trying to use our reputation to make more money". I'm not absolutist like that (I'm fine with indie book publishers/bookstores paying hundreds of dollars for a table if they feel like it), I dig this anarchist/zine purist take and I feel like we're in good company. (We're going to have a notice for potential sponsors to write to us to ask to sponsor, but it looks like we'll be picky. At most we'd probably have three sponsor tables anyway.)