#factsheet5

[fluke-fanzine]

Someone sent me the Factsheet 5 review of Fluke 4, which I published in late ‘95. If anyone has any other ‘90s Fluke reviews in Factsheet 5, MRR, etc. please let me know! “No 4, Winter ‘96. Handwritten tales of a Seattle-Little Rock skater and his lost Polish love. The fond memories of Fluke’s [great] grandmother were really touching. He recalls what it was like living with her, catching bees, going downtown and occasionally getting a ‘switching.’ Lengthy look back on his past as a skater, from his first ramp in ‘84 to the present day. No trades/free to prisoners/prints letters. Price: $1 + 2 stamps...” #flukefanzine #factsheetfive #zine #zines #fanzine #fanzines #factsheet5 #flukefanzinefriday #flukezine #zinereviews https://www.instagram.com/p/CEKI1fKD_Zb/?igshid=avfs02pfgdqr

[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

All Good Magazines Go to Heaven

The archive is still peppered with periodicals from the MTV days, marked “James.” To illustrate the point, Mr. Hyman, 47, pulled from the shelves a 1995 issue of the defunct FactSheet5 — “The definitive guide to the zine revolution” — with his name scrawled on the cover in black marker. After all these years, Mr. Hyman is still intimately familiar with its contents. “This is a phenomenal publication. It listed zines, just a quirky catalog that reviewed fringe zines. It was sick,” he said, before seeking out and indicating a surprisingly positive review of a zine dedicated entirely to its founder’s genitals.

Each member of the team has a particular familiarity with the archive’s contents and has an institutional knowledge of certain titles and their whereabouts. Mr. Hyman is great on music, with a particular fondness for New Musical Express. Ms. Turk is strong on fashion, and Ms. Marmara is especially good at unearthing what Mr. Hyman calls “visual gold” — weird or unsung design elements, photo shoots or ads.

“If we all died tomorrow, it would be over,” Ms. Turk said.

No donation is turned down, and Mr. Hyman described the archive as a final resting place for printed matter. “We’re heaven for magazines,” he said.

The archive, for example, recently accepted a “loan” of around 2,680 British, Italian, French and American fashion magazines dating back to the 1930s from the British writer Colin McDowell, the author of 25 books on fashion. Mr. McDowell said his magazines were becoming “unmanageable in my Soho pied-à-terre and overwhelming in my house in the country.”

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Mr. McDowell said he saved the magazines because they are “the quickest and most memorable source of information,” and that he is “more interested in how clothes are featured in magazines than in their catwalk life,” as well as in fashion photography and illustration trends. Mr. Hyman accepted the magazines on the condition that Mr. McDowell can recover them from the archive should he need them and that his collection remain intact.

Jeremy Leslie, the owner of MagCulture, a magazine shop in London that serves as the locus of a boom in independent magazine publishing in England, said that because magazines by their very nature are rushed to press, they reflect the particular quirks of society during short intervals of time.

“In order to understand the value of the Hyman Archive, you have to understand the value of magazines above and beyond their contemporary purpose,” he said. “There is a canon of great magazines that is forming, but actually when you look through even magazines that are central to that canon, you see the pages you don’t get shown. There are so many subplots to this bigger picture that don’t get spotted unless you have the whole thing.”

This is especially true of niche magazines or ones that aren’t widely thought of as classics, Mr. Leslie said. “When you come to look at something from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, there are obvious kinds of historical archive-worthy elements, but they are also a great record of design trends, typefaces, photography, writing and technology, so they are fantastic records of time gone.”

During a recent visit, Mr. Hyman showed a reporter some of the titles and design elements he considers particularly important, including fake ads from Mad magazine trolling the cigarette industry; Kate Moss’s first cover (The Face, July 1990); The Notorious B.I.G.’s first appearance in The Source (March 1992); Rihanna on the cover of the first free issue of New Musical Express (September 2015) and a hacking magazine from 1984 called 2600, which, Mr. Hyman said, “is the frequency you used to use to get free calls if you blow your Cap’n Crunch whistle down the phone line,” and lists all of the direct phone extensions in the Reagan White House.

For the archivists, “weird” is the highest praise. They’re fascinated by the ads in a copy of Family Circle from 1974, and a cereal-box-shaped Select magazine from January 1997 — dedicated ironically to the year 1996 — occupies pride of place above their desk, despite a Jolly Rancher candy that came with the magazine having melted inside it.

Photo

Alexia Marmara, a staff member of the archive, with a copy of Zoom Magazine. Credit Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times

There is also a copy of the British trade magazine Television from 1980, the cover of which features a bikini-clad model holding what appear to be the innards of television set. “This is an early example of a sexy model selling technology,” Ms. Marmara said. “It’s just so weird. The one after that they went back to showing just the technology.”

Mr. Hyman isn’t a completist, at least not anymore. “I used to be,” he said, “but it will never end.” Instead, he is seeking funding to finish meta-tagging and digitizing the entire archive for use by academics, curators and researchers. He still tries to get two copies of each magazine, but now it’s because one needs to be unbound for faster scanning. An archivist has examined the setup at Cannon House and determined it will be safe for another five years or so before needing to be housed properly, ideally as the permanent collection in a proper museum of magazines.

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“The style of exhibition is changing, it’s becoming more populist, more based around contemporary culture, so therefore magazines are becoming important objects,” Ms. Turk said. “They show the period, they’re great objects.”

Still, there are titles Mr. Hyman covets. He recently attended a lecture on Japanese magazines, and his mind was somewhat blown by the Tokyo-based Popeye, the nearly unclassifiable “magazine for city boys.”

“My jaw just hit the ground. It was ridiculous. I was like, ‘I can’t wait for the crate to arrive with every issue of Popeye,’” he said. The speaker “had another magazine that was just about businessmen who’d gotten too drunk and went to sleep in the middle of the night in weird places. And he had two different magazines just about pigeons. I was like, ‘whoa.’”

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DAVID SHAFTEL

The post All Good Magazines Go to Heaven appeared first on dailygate.

[proviralmedia-blog]

All Good Magazines Go to Heaven

The archive continues to be peppered with periodicals from the MTV days, marked “James.” To illustrate the purpose, Mr. Hyman, 47, pulled from the cabinets a 1995 challenge of the defunct FactSheet5 — “The definitive guide to the zine revolution” — together with his title scrawled on the duvet in black marker. After all these years, Mr. Hyman continues to be intimately aware of its contents.…

[almostnormalcomics]

For Mini-Comic Monday it’s…Copy This! #48. is a 40-page, B&W mini comic info zine published by D. Blake Werts! Cover by Verl Holt Bond!

In this issue of Copy This! D. Blake Werts turns the reins over to Michael Neno as he sits down with Verl Holt Bond to dig into some interesting biographical background info! First Michael re-visits a 1992 interview he did with Verl, then he jumps forward and serves up a recent interview. Between the two interviews Michael and Verl discuss when Verl first began drawing, influences and inspirations, E.C. Comics, minicomics, the small press, music, teaching, fine art, projects since the first interview and current projects, the demise of review zines (miss you Factsheet5), and mental illness. Michael concludes the interview with Verl’s contact info so you can correspond with him and get your hands on some Verl Holt Bond comics!

Next, in the community news and info section, we’re treated to offerings from: Carrie McNinch (You Don’t Get There From Here); Ian Shires (Time Trvlr); Dale Martin (Watusi’s Doghouse Funhouse); George Erling (Cartoon Loonacy); Jacob Alvarez (HypnoSpiral Comics Book Reporter); Matt Jones (Silas, Intergalactic Stoner Slug); Lara (Dandelion Daydream); Scott Davis (Minis, Digest, Etc.); and Richard Krauss (The Digest Enthusiast).

To get your hands on Copy This! and for more info contact:

D. Blake Werts 12339 Chesley Drive Charlotte, NC 28277 or email Blake at: bwerts (at) vnet (dot) net