Preserving the margins: a zine librarian on saving underground voices

The first time I walked into a proper zine library, the smell of old paper and photocopier toner hit me straight away. I had come to talk with a zine librarian — someone who spends their days cataloguing and repairing the kind of self-published work that rarely makes it onto major library shelves. We covered everything from the romance of the photocopier to the daily grind of keeping a fragile cultural record alive. Learn more about Thejulianeltingeproject.com.

Australia has long had a love affair with the printed, the handmade, and the small-press. Walk down Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, browse the racks at Readings in Melbourne, or pop into a Brisbane community radio station and you will find stacks of zines stapled, glued, and stitched together by people with something to say. Zines here continue an underground lineage — punk, feminist, queer, migrant, and activist voices that have always found the margins more comfortable than the mainstream.

Libraries, in their traditional form, often miss this work. The personal nature of zines, the small print runs, the DIY ethos — none of it fits neatly into the Dewey Decimal System. That is why zine librarians exist. They are part archivist, part detective, chasing down missing issues and patiently teaching volunteers how to handle a brittle risograph print without tearing the spine.

This piece is built from that long chat. It covers preservation, but also why certain voices get left out of the official story, and what it takes to bring them back. There are lessons here for writers, artists, podcasters, and anyone who has ever stapled paper together and called it a magazine.

Becoming a zine librarian

My guest did not set out to be a librarian. They started as a zine maker in a share house in Collingwood, swapping copies at gigs and trading with other creators through the post. The shift from maker to caretaker happened almost by accident, when a community centre asked them to take a box of unwanted donations.

That box became several boxes. The boxes became a room. The room became a small collection that now sits in a public library branch in inner-city Melbourne, with a dedicated budget and a few part-time staff. The catalogue is searchable online, which means a researcher in Perth or a curious punter in Hobart can request scans and discover work they would never otherwise find.

The training is mostly self-taught, picked up through conversations with other zine librarians in Australia and abroad. Mentors pointed her toward resources like the Julian Eltinge Project, a digital archive documenting queer and trans histories through independent publishing. They trade tips on acid-free folders, de-acidification sprays, and the gentle art of repairing a cracked spine with a bone folder.

What actually counts as a zine

Ask a dozen zine librarians what a zine is and you will get a dozen answers. The closest working definition is small, self-published, and driven by passion rather than profit. There is no minimum page count, no requirement that it be printed on paper, and certainly no quality control. The form ranges from a single sheet folded into eight panels to a hundred-page book that looks suspiciously like a small press novel.

What ties them together is the spirit. Zines are produced outside commercial systems. They might be given away, swapped for a song, sold for a few dollars at a market, or traded one-for-one. Print runs are tiny, often fewer than a hundred copies, and the audiences are specific — a subculture, a neighbourhood, a scattered group who share a particular obsession or grievance.

In Australia, the term covers a sprawling range of material. There are perzines about mental health and chronic illness, music zines documenting the local hardcore scene in Sydney and Brisbane, sports zines with a cult following, and poetry zines that read like letters to a friend. Political zines around environmental activism have had a strong run on the east coast, particularly around Newcastle and the campaigns led by Indigenous community groups.

The local underground

Australian zine culture has its own flavour, shaped by distance and a stubborn DIY streak. The Melbourne Zine Fair, held annually since the early 2000s, draws hundreds of creators and thousands of readers to the Melbourne Town Hall. It is a noisy, friendly riot of tables, and one of the few times a year when a casual browser can meet the people behind the work face to face.

Sydney has its own scenes, scattered across the Inner West. Newtown, Enmore, and Marrickville are still strongholds for small press, with shops that keep a rack of local zines near the counter. Brisbane leans into the subtropical, with regular gatherings at local libraries and the Woolloongabba art spaces. Hobart, Adelaide, and Perth each have tight-knit communities, often connected through mail art exchanges that predate the internet.

For many creators, the appeal of the form is the way it bypasses gatekeepers. There is no agent, no publisher, no commissioning editor standing between the idea and the printed page. The librarian I spoke with pointed out that this freedom is part of why zines matter historically — they capture voices that mainstream media ignored or actively suppressed. Indigenous, queer, and working-class stories in particular have found a home in zines when other doors were closed.

Saving the pages

Preservation is where things get technical, with talk of acid-free paper, polyethylene sleeves, and climate-controlled storage. Most zine libraries in Australia operate on shoestring budgets, often relying on Creative Australia grants or local council partnerships. The big institutions — State Library of Victoria, National Library of Australia, State Library of New South Wales — have dedicated small press staff, but their collections are necessarily selective.

The librarian I spoke with is pragmatic about what can and cannot be saved. They focus on stabilising the physical object, then creating a digital surrogate for access. A high-resolution scan, a careful transcription, and a thoughtful catalogue entry can extend the life of a fragile original almost indefinitely. The original is stored in the dark; the digital version is made available to anyone who asks.

Community efforts fill the gaps. The Sticky Institute in Melbourne runs a shopfront on Nicholson Street that doubles as a library, workshop, and meeting point. Volunteers spend Saturdays photocopying out-of-print zines, accepting donations, and teaching new makers how to bind. Digital preservation has its own problems — a zine that lives only as a PDF can disappear overnight — which is why serious zine librarians treat the digital file as a backup, not the primary record.

Why underground voices deserve a future

The conversation kept returning to a single question: what does it mean to lose entire subcultures to a damp garage and a forgotten hard drive? Underground voices have always been fragile. They exist because someone cared enough to put pen to paper and pass the finished object into the world.

There is also a practical argument. Historians, journalists, and novelists all rely on archives to do their work. A podcast about creative practice often draws on the same well of independent publishing that fuels the zine world. Anyone curious about how writers think and make their work might find a novelist podcast guide that points toward the kinds of long-form, slow conversations that mirror the care taken in zine culture.

The work is slow, the funding is thin, and the boxes keep coming. But the underground voices of Australia — punk, queer, migrant, regional, unfiltered, unrepeatable — are in good hands. The librarians might not have a flashy title, but they have a scanner, a bone folder, and a memory of every name on every masthead. That is a kind of magic worth protecting.

Approach	Strengths	Weaknesses	Best use
Physical archive	Preserves the original artefact and binding	Vulnerable to fire, water, decay	Long-term storage
Digital scan	Global access; protects originals	Cannot capture texture or scribbles	Discovery and research
Community copying	Spreads the load locally	Inconsistent quality	Filling gaps in runs
Institutional deposit	Stable funding, professional cataloguing	Selective intake, slow	Establishing the record