Cut, Copy, Remember: The People Saving America's Stapled Underground Before It Disappears Forever

The Stuff Nobody Kept

Estate sales are where a lot of history goes to die. Boxes get priced at two dollars and picked through by strangers who are mostly looking for lamps. But walk into enough of them in enough cities and eventually you find something that stops you cold — a stack of photocopied pamphlets, stapled down the spine, the ink already fading at the edges. Maybe they're from 1983. Maybe 1991. Maybe the person who made them is still alive, or maybe they're not. Either way, this is probably the last copy.

Roberta Fuentes finds things like this roughly twice a month. She's been doing it for eleven years, working her way through estate sales and flea markets and the occasional dumpster adjacent to a university library undergoing a collection purge. Her apartment in Philadelphia is organized around the problem of storage — flat files stacked against one wall, acid-free sleeves, a flatbed scanner that runs almost every night. She is, by her own description, a zine historian. By most other descriptions, she's someone doing a job that doesn't officially exist to preserve a medium that most institutions still don't take seriously.

"Archives want things that matter," she says, without particular bitterness. "And for a long time, the definition of 'matters' didn't include a twelve-page photocopied newsletter made by a queer punk collective in Tulsa in 1986. But that newsletter is the only record that collective ever existed. So who decides it doesn't matter?"

What Zines Were and Why It's Complicated

The word zine — short for fanzine, itself a compression of fan magazine — covers an enormous and somewhat unruly territory. Science fiction fans were making them in the 1930s. Punk scenes exploded the form in the late '70s. By the '80s and '90s, zines were the connective tissue of dozens of overlapping underground communities: riot grrrl, straight edge, anarchist, skateboarding, body modification, queer youth, small-press comics, radical left politics, radical right politics, and everything in between and adjacent.

What they had in common was the photocopier and the postal service. You made them cheap, you mailed them cheap, and you traded them with strangers whose addresses you found in the back pages of other zines. The whole system was decentralized by design — there was no headquarters, no publisher, no editor-in-chief. Just people with something to say and access to a copy machine, often borrowed from a sympathetic employer after hours.

"The form itself was a political statement," says Jerome Adeyemi, who teaches media history at a small college in Ohio and has been building a zine archive in his department for six years. "You didn't need permission. You didn't need money. You didn't need anyone's approval. That was the point. And that's also why so little of it survived — nobody was thinking about preservation. They were thinking about the next issue."

The Archive Problem

Some institutions have started to catch up. The Sallie Bingham Center at Duke has a significant zine collection. The Barnard Zine Library has been active since 2003. Scattered public libraries around the country — most famously in Portland and Denver — maintain living collections that still accept new submissions. These are real and valuable resources.

But they represent a fraction of what was produced, and an even smaller fraction of what was produced outside major cities, by communities that had specific reasons to distrust institutions. A lot of what got made in the '80s and '90s was made by people who were not, for various reasons, interested in donating their work to universities.

This is where the independent archivists come in. People like Roberta, who operates entirely outside any institutional framework. People like Calvin Marsh, a retired mail carrier in Memphis who started collecting zines in 1994 because he was getting them in his bag and couldn't bring himself to throw them away. Calvin now has approximately eight thousand items in his house, catalogued in a spreadsheet system he built himself and has been refining for two decades.

"I have things that don't exist anywhere else," he says, matter-of-factly. "I know that because I've looked. You search for them and they're not there. The only place they exist is here, in this room, in these boxes. That's a weird feeling. It's also why I can't stop."

Reading the Visual Language

For the historians in this community, zines aren't just documents — they're visual artifacts that carry information in their form as much as their content. The cut-and-paste aesthetic of early punk zines, the ransom-note typography, the deliberate ugliness that was also a kind of beauty — all of it communicates something about the communities that made them, the resources they had access to, the aesthetic arguments they were making.

"You can date a zine pretty accurately just by looking at it," says Adeyemi. "The technology leaves traces. When desktop publishing arrived, you can see it immediately — the fonts change, the layouts get cleaner. When cheap digital cameras arrived, the photos change. The medium is a timeline."

Roberta goes further. She's been working on a long-form research project mapping the visual lineages between zine communities across different cities and decades — tracking how design ideas traveled through the mail, how a layout style that appeared in a San Francisco zine in 1987 showed up in a Minneapolis zine in 1989. It's the kind of art history that requires holding the physical objects, because the scans don't always capture what matters.

What Gets Lost If Nobody Does This

The urgency is real and it's physical. Newsprint degrades. Photocopier toner flakes. Staples rust through paper. The window for saving a lot of this material is measured in years, not decades.

But the archivists in this community will tell you that what's really at stake isn't the paper — it's the proof that certain people existed, thought certain things, built certain communities, and left a record of it. Zines were made by people who knew they were unlikely to be written about anywhere else. They were their own documentation, their own testimony.

"These were people saying: we are here, this is what we think, this is what we look like," says Roberta, holding a 1989 zine from a queer youth collective in a mid-sized Midwestern city that no longer exists. "If we lose this, we're saying: actually, you weren't. And I'm not willing to say that."

She puts it back in its sleeve. She picks up the next one.