This article first appeared in FANG Vol. 1 in 2005.
There was once a time, just between the rise of the fast-food, fast-everything economy in the West in the seventies and the flourishing of the modern Internet in the ‘90s, when the distribution of one’s art through amateur media was possible, although it wasn’t easy. The availability of small-press printing methods, not to mention photocopiers and stencil machines, made it possible for individuals to make magazines in moderate quantities – with the assumption, of course, that they’d fill this magazine with interesting material.
Non-professional art and literature enthusiasts found in these technologies a great opportunity to distribute their work to an audience, if they had one, but the most interesting use of these technologies was the way they were employed by artists and writers amongst themselves.
Amateur journalists, political activists, scientists, artists, connoisseurs, writers – amateurs, all, in the original sense of the word: people with a love for a craft that have no hope of recognition or money or fame. Or rather, they have hope, but that isn’t why they practice their craft, be it reporting or drawing or writing,. It was these people who were suddenly given by the world at large the technology and infrastructure to, for the first time, overcome the boundaries of geography and form communities based on the sharing of their work.
The Amateur Press Association or APA was formed and was one of the expressions of the ‘commons’ principle which is now ever more making its way into the digital realm. A ‘commons’ is a resource of limited availability which must be managed or risk total depletion. Examples are the file-sharing networks so popular these days, Bittorrent, Emule and others, where a single user uploads a file to a small number of other users who, by virtue of the software they use, automatically distribute the portions they have received to other users.
APA’s functioned in a similar manner. An APA consisted of a limited number of artists or writers of like mind and disposition, typically between ten and forty, with a number of rules that governed membership. All members were obligated to produce a mininum number of works per time period, of a quality that honored that of other members’ works. Each member was obligated to manufacture one copy of their work for each of the APA’s members and mail these out to all of them and in return he or she would receive a copy of each of the other members’ works. Such a group could survive without leadership as long as the group’s members could enforce the rules.
Sometimes an APA would have a leader, typically the person who erected the group to begin with. In such cases, members would manufacture copies o their work, but rather than sending these individually to the other members, they would send them to the APA’s leader, who would then bind one copy of each submission together, give it a cover, and mail this magazine-like bundle of works out to the other members periodically. Such closed-circle publications were called APA ‘zines.
The term ‘zine which, since it contains an apostrophe in itself, I haven’t given quote marks, comes not from ‘magazine’ but from ‘fanzine’. Fanzines were amateur magazines printed through modern means of reproduction such as the aforementioned photocopiers or stencil machines, run by amateurs and contributed to by amateurs. They operated in that blessed space within copyright law that is governed by common sense, a space which has been more and more marginalized here in the west, and while few now still function they were very similar to the doujinshi of Japan. These, like the fanzines of yesteryear, are magazines by amateurs dedicated to a television series, a film, a book or a fictional world where amateurs would write stories or articles and draw art or comics set within the setting of the series, book, or film, sometimes making use of that setting’s characters.
The difference between a fanzine and an APA is that a fanzine has editors who decide whether or not a submitted work is printed and that a fanzine is available to the general public. Anyone can buy one or subscribe to one, while an APA is available only to contributors.
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