About Zine World
Zine World: A Reader's Guide to the Underground Press was a zine review zine. Published from 1996 to 2012, Zine World offered reviews and information about zines, comics, self-published books, chapbooks, and other DIY stuff. Often called the best review zine published in the U.S., Zine World was an extensive guide to zine culture.
Zine World was written, edited and published by an all-volunteer staff who believed free speech is for everyone, not just for giant corporations. Zine World covered culture outside the corporate confines. We reviewed zines, books, comics, newsletters, one-shots, DVDs, posters, spoken word recordings, or anything else in almost any media on any subject -- except music. Our focus was on material that's not available through normal commercial channels. In addition to the reviews, Zine World covered news: When publishers were brought up on charges for what they've published, when kids were kicked out of school for creating a zine, we tried to spread the word.
This website includes archival material from issues of the zine, including full content of some issues, as well as more current resource information (that will be updated occasionally when the editrix has time).
Walk into virtually any corporate-owned bookstore in America, and you won't find anything on any shelf that wasn't designed, mass-produced, ordered, delivered, and stocked primarily for the purpose of making a profit. At its best, the underground press is the opposite of that. It's not about how much money can be squeezed out of publishing. It's about how much of the writer/artist's soul he or she can squeeze onto the page.
Zines are still as important as they ever were.