Buy. More. Zines.

I first met Mail Art Superstar Mark Pawson in the mid 1990s in Camden Town, where I found myself record shopping for Handbag House 12"s, disappointed that Jazzman Gerald in the Stables Market didn't have anything by Jon Pleased Wimmin but only some old Sun Ra LPs. Empty handed and with a tenner burning a hole in my pocket, I spied a rack of postcards, gaudy comic books and hastily photocopied and stapled pamphlets.


I came home to my parent's house, bereft of handbag house but bearing a trove of ephemera thst would lead me inexorably into both inexhaustible pathways, invisible networks as well as momentarily fascinating dead ends: a micro-history of plug diagrams, a community based space program, a gazeteer of kinder egg toys, weird psychogeographies that remapped places and spaces I believed familiar. 


While the digital realm felt, in the heady pre-millennial fervor of the late 1990s, that it would be the apotheosis of connection and liberation, has from this more somber vantage point, become enclosed and drained by the algorithm of the barest possibility of chance enounter, the zine fair retains that space of chance, of life, of the possibility of solidarity and enthusiasm. I can only implore you, whimsical as it may sound, to buy​ more zines.

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