My latest obsessione: zines.

Trying to find the You Letter Writing Marathon at the TINA festival, I happened across the Octapod office (little known Newcastle hangout for uni students, artists, activists etc).

I wandered in to ask if they knew where this Staple Manor place was, but never finished the sentence because I saw what you see above out of the corner of my eye. What is it? A Zine Library. 10 years of zines, collected from all over the world, vaguely sorted into sort of genres, desperately in need of someone to love it and organise the shit out of it. I put up my hand. Here's hoping :P

On Saturday morning I went to a workshop at Octapod called "Cataloguing the Zine Library" which was basically a gathering of zine writers, fans, who had converged on Newie for the This Is Not Art festival. We spent a couple of hours supposedly sorting them out, but mostly gossiping and checking out the awesomeness. I took a few photos of my favourites to share with mah blog.

The Sic Bag (above and the two below) an illustration and comic zine. The standard of work here was just incredible.

Mmmmm Butterfly hair.

This little one was my favourite. Really simple, clean illustrations with lovely little vignette poem thingys.

This one was discovered by a lovely Canberran boy, fantastic cover.

Finally, I liked the story in this one, a comic zine, but was far more taken with the occasional depection of English Architecture. Check out the building... hot.

Will post about the Zine fair yesterday much later, because I have a lovely stack of zines to go through. Amazing stuff. People just kept coming up to my stall and saying "I like your work, here take this" and handing me a little pile of the things. Other people would come up and ask me if I did swaps, which once it was explained to me how it worked, I was more than happy to oblige. Ran out of copies of my Book Zine after a bit, so I started swapping my toys for them. Woot. I heart zines, TINA and my couch.