Direct link to some good culture, tech, and/or social justice zines you can print for free

Printing zines to read yourself

I use “free zine” to mean zines you don’t need to pay to access in some way—read online, print copies of to read on paper, and/or get a pre-printed copy of from someone else. Unfortunately, printing is not always free or affordable.

I’m not sure how many libraries offer any free printing these days, but a good library worker will want to help you access info and reading if they can. If you aren’t able to afford printing a zine on your own and your library posts writing saying it charges for printing, you might still ask your local library workers if they know of options, and let them know you’re trying to access zines for reading or learning purposes.

I am not aware of such options at UVA—where I currently work—but I would not necessarily know of any! If you’re near UVA Library—which serves anyone in the region, not just folks studying/working at UVA—consider asking folks at a front desk of one of the libraries, or using the UVA Library homepage’s “Ask a Librarian” chat for questions about community printing (or other topics, especially anything you may feel more comfortable asking online than in person).

Here’s the subset of all my Zine Bakery project’s catalogued zines allowing online or printable free access; and here’s the subset of all catalogued zines you can print for free. The difference between the two sets is a small number of zines are free to read online but cannot be downloaded; for example, some are on platforms like Issuu, where there’s some page-turning reading view but download is disabled by the creator.

Live in (or visiting) Charlottesville? Pt 1

Check out The Beautiful Idea! “A trans-owned antifascist bookstore, queer makers’ market, alternative event space, and radical community hub on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, VA… Come in today to find your new favorite read, the perfect gift, or just a safe, friendly place to relax!”.

In addition to selling zines (I bought so many zines there first time I went…), they often have free zines as well. And also frequent free community events prioritizing queer folks, community building, community safety and resistance (check their Instagram too).

Live in (or visiting) Charlottesville? Pt 2

I run a small, free public zine distro in my workplace (the Scholars’ Lab in the University of Virginia’s Shannon Library): Zine Bakery @ Scholars’ Lab. Anyone (no UVA affiliation needed) is welcome to take as many zines as they’d like, including multiple copies of the same zine to share with friends, students, etc. These are mostly zines that are free for anyone to print and share, plus some additional zines where the creators have generously allowed us to share copies we print for free from our one location (but you’d otherwise need to pay to access the zine).

We have nothing near to the entire ZB catalog available on our distro racks—these zines are all printed, folded, stapled, and shelved by me during meetings and in random bits of free time (i.e. isn’t my core job), so it’s always a small, rotating selection and can get scant when I’m on vacation, sick, or especially busy.

To make sure I maintain the ability to do this project with as much justice and care as I can manage, that distro is a subset of a larger project (“Zine Bakery @ Scholars’ Lab”, rather than Zine Bakery). That means that the kinds of neutral (is this zine likely of use to folks who tend to visit the library or work with Scholars’ Lab?) and negative (will including this zine in the public distro attract censorship, require closing the distro, imperil lab/library/job?) decisions I make curating that distro don’t impact what I do with the larger project. But do know there are some zines in my catalog the Scholars’ Lab distro does not offer copies of.

(We’re not able to print zines for folks by request, unfortunately.)

Free zines vs paying for zines

Art is work, and workers deserve to benefit from their labor. (Everyone deserves a thriving wage regardless of if they “work”, but that’s a tangent I’ll save for elsewhere, other than to ask you if you had a kneejerk response to that, to sit with the large number of jobs that are actively harmful and disrespectful to workers for no reason—e.g. so many retail jobs—and think about what makes forcing people to work in such situations the qualification for deserving and getting a good life.)

I’ve prioritized cataloguing free zines for a number of reasons, including to be able to make them a visible, free part of my library work that anyone can take away to keep. I haven’t yet been able to find or successfully propose a pool of funding to use how I want: toward working with authors of non-free zines around a paid license to distribute physical zines from just our location. If anyone knows of models for that, please do let me know!

Wanting to pay authors/creators, and also wanting to help anyone access information and reading without needing to pay or prove they’re a member of a university, are both important to me. The Zine Bakery distro at Scholars’ Lab is the way I’ve found to balance those goals, using my ability to print some zines as an employe, as well as putting work time and work space toward supporting a distro.

I include direct links to where authors host their zines, rather than rehost them myself—both as an ethical and legal requirement, but also because collecting has historically been (and still is) often extractive work. I want to amplify zines and point people to their authors and websites. I’m hoping to pull out these sites into one webpage in the future that just links to zine authors’ webpages and stores, to amplify those further. I’m hoping to work on more design approaches like that; e.g. a small one is I recently added a bit of code to the top paragraph on my homepage that rotates through names of specific catalogued authors, to try to make it more obvious these zines are not mine.