Self Published Zines and Journals of the Month
Here we go again! Another round-up of the best self-published zines and journals available at our wonderful Book Shop.
Bad Day issue 15
£8.00
If you want to know what John Baldessari does when he wakes up (at 5.15 every day), what Brad Troemel’s bought off Silk Road, why Alice Waese chose jewellery over cutlery, why How To Dress Well think Soulja Boy is a genius, how many followers Jeanette Hayes has on Twitter or what Peter Sutherland pointed his camera at as he traipsed up Everest, or if you just collect magazines that print blue ink on blue paper, this ones for you.
Pink Mince #9
£5.00
The punk issue of the best designed queer zine out there. Dan’s prolific DIY output results in another beautiful edition full of scratchy drawings of punk boys courtesy of Sina of Art Fag, a collection of punk related pulp erotica, memories of X Ray Spex and lots of photographs of sweaty mosh-pits – an ode to rejecting conformity, finding your own way and most of all doing it yourself – start your own zine, form your own band. Put a Limp Wrist record on, read this, then go kick some homophobes head in.
Pleasure
£7.00
As far as we know, we are the only place in the entire island to have physical copies of this wondrous new edition. It’s a pleasure to the eyes, hands and ears as you imagine the sounds of synthesised Bach, Call Me Maybe (though I disagree that “anyone who authentically enjoys [it] is a likely victim of brainwashing”), or reminisce about imagining what a record sounds like before you get a chance to put needle to vinyl. Creative writing about music with a slant toward avant-garde classical may not yet be a genre to warrant its own section of the shop just yet but until that day, Pleasure fills the void nicely.
Raven’s Revenge
£3.00
Without doubt the best rabble-rousing anarcho-comic made by a ten year old we’ve ever had in the shop, Marlowe Chan-Reeves’ zine follows Raven as he escapes from the Tower of London and meets up with his pals V (from V for Vendetta) and Wildcat (of the eponymous comic strip) as they run from the government, police and the dreaded CCTV Man. With cameos from William Blake and a brief spell at the Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel, any adventure that culminates in Parliament being blown-up is worth spending £3 on.
PaperWork # 1; Lost and Found
£10.00
A new project from Rowan Powell and Catherine Smiles aiming to transcend, merge and reinvent notions of the book, authorship, art, writing and art-writing. The result is a collection of risograph-printed flat sheets held together with an elastic band meaning when the texts and images are read in the traditional way you would read a book they become interrupted and fragmented, merging into each other and creating new combinations of work. It requires dismantling to read which is apt for its subtitle: lost and found. Featuring a long list of contributors, some of whom I’ll list now: Isabella Martin, Patrick Coyle, Arron Sands, Will Sheridan, Tom Duggan, Kyra Kordoski.
All of these are available to purchase in the ICA Bookshop, either online or in person. Please visit us to see our full range of Zines and Self Published material.
Peter Willis
