Announcing the Library Society of the World Zine, a planned dead-tree compilation of writing about libraries by library people.

If all goes well, when librarians gather in Chicago in July of 2009 for the American Library Association Annual Meeting, LSW agents will be packing copies of the first ever issue of the LSW zine along with their “FRBR? I hardly knew her!” t-shirts and Roy Tennant thongs. We will then sell or otherwise distribute the zines to an unwary population of humid, bus-riding librarians.

If at this point you are asking, “what’s a zine?” I’ll just say briefly that it is a small-circulation magazine-style publication, often photocopied and produced on the cheap. If you want to know more about zines, I refer you to the Barnard College Library Zine Collection and to the Wikipedia entry for “zine.”

This particular zine will be a collection of work by many people, including, I hope, YOU. Here is what I am thinking so far:

  • Articles or artwork should be your own work, not previously published (though some collage or “found” submissions would also be welcome).
  • Pseudonyms are fine.
  • Personal attacks are not fine.
  • The LSW Zine will not get you tenure, so save the longitudinal studies and the content analyses for the Journal of Tedious Librarianship (though parodies of such articles would be great).
  • Cursing is fine. Keep that in mind if you don’t like cursing,. Your submission will inevitably be next to someone who does like cursing. A lot.
  • Keep it fairly short. A one-to-five page submission is more likely to be published than a twenty page monster.
  • Keep it on the personal level. What do you love or hate about libraries? What gets you excited? Tell us about you worst day on the job or the day it all clicked. What is in your desk drawer? Draw the magic library unicorn. Who would win a Texas Cage Match, Meredith Farkas or Sandy Berman (assume Farkas isn’t pregnant and Berman can use whatever subject headings he chooses)? Just keep it personal and specific.
  • I, Steve Lawson, am the editor, and while I aim to be inclusive, it’s entirely possible I won’t be able to accept everything submitted. You are welcome to start your own zine titled “Steve Lawson is a Tool.”
  • The zine will be black-and-white, probably photocopied, and “half-letter” size (or the size you get when you fold a US Letter Size sheet of paper in half, or 5.5 x 8.5 in.). It will as many pages long as it takes, though the cost of printing will be a factor in how long we can let it get (see below).
  • In the grand tradition of the author-pays publishing model, authors will be expected to help print the zine, either by being responsible for making a certain number of copies or kicking in a certain amount of money. I haven’t really figured this out yet, but if you aren’t willing to spend $10 – $20 to get this thing printed, please don’t submit. (If $10 – $20 is a legitimate hardship for you, please let me know and we will work something out.)
  • I expect to have two deadlines: those people who just want to submit raw text and/or images and leave it up to me (and, I hope, the lovely and talented Tim Keneipp) to design the pages will need to get things in a little sooner. Those who want to go the whole nine yards and design their own 5.5 x 8.5 in. pages can hold out until a little later. In any case, ALA is in mid-July, so expect to see deadlines in April and May to leave time to print the crazy thing.
  • ALA Annual is merely a convenient deadline, far enough away to make this all seem plausible, and a time when many of us will actually be in close physical proximity. The American Library Association has nothing to do with this zine.
  • Will we sell it? Give it away? How would we handle collecting money? What format should submissions be in? Is anyone going to want this thing anyway? Will Michael Gorman have a column? Answer: That all remains to be determined.

Will this work? Heck if I know. But it should be fun to try. Leave a comment on this post or email steve at stevelawson dot name if you want in.

[Cross-posted to Humbug! The LSW Blog.]