A new wrinkle this time is a theme: “Lost and Found in the Library.” Everything from your virginity to Jesus, a calculator to a long-forgotten manuscript, this issue will be about those things (people, ideas, etc.) that we have lost and/or found in a library.

The deadline to submit is May 15, which is only a little over a month away. My projected print date will be June 15 or after I get back from my planned trip to see Josh in mid-June. I’m not going to ALA or any other big library conference soon, so there’s not that external time pressure.

Submissions may be textual, photographic, artistic, prose, poetry, rants, reviews, laments, crossword puzzles, and so on and so forth. They need not be on the “lost and found” theme, but if I get a lot of good lost & found submissions, I may hold back other things for a later issue.

If you’d like to design/lay out your own submission, that’s wonderful. The zine will again be half-letter size, or 5.5in x 8.5 in. I’m also happy to accept just text or pictures from you and design your pages myself. Send submissions electronically to steve@stevelawson.name or postally to Library Society of the World Training Center / PO Box 7893 / Colorado Springs CO 80933. As always, I am the sole editor and I don’t promise I’ll publish everything anybody sends me.

I also have an idea for a group-participation project. If you don’t have an idea for a fully worked-out submission, keep an eye out for an announcement of that plan in the days to come.

The idea is alive and well. I still have every intention of having the first issue of the Library Society of the World zine ready for ALA Annual in July. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, try reading this earlier post, The LSW Zine: a Call for Rants, Manifestos, articles and artwork.)

Several people have already submitted finished contributions. For the rest of you, here’s a deadline: all submissions for the LSW zine are due on or before Monday, May 31.

In addition to the guidelines in that previous post there’s one other thing I’d like to mention. My wording in that post or people’s preconceptions about what a “zine article” would be may have made it sound like I’m just looking for snarky or satirical or “edgy” work. That’s really not true. I think most of us who work in libraries love libraries and library people, and if you have a story that is full of love and sunshine, I’d love to publish that story.

If you want to contribute, but aren’t sure what to write, I think what I’d most like to see right now are real-life tales of library work. What is it like to work in a prison library or to routinely handle manuscripts that are hundreds of years old or to have someone pull a gun on you at the circ desk? Think of something that is interesting about your work, and tell us a specific story about that.

Or don’t. Make a collage of 1970s punchcards found in the backs of old books. Interview people on the bus about their favorite librarians. Write the first scene of “LIBRARIAN!” the musical. I will exercise my discretion (such as it is) about what to publish or not publish, but I expect there will be room for just about everything.

Leave a comment on this post or email steve at stevelawson dot name if you want in. And get to work: you have a month.

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.]