Budols and bargains @ BLTX!
My zine collection so far... not including those made by my students in class! It's quite hard to believe that I've only just started my era of zine collecting in the early months of 2024 ~ I feel as though I've been amassing a collection of zines for much much longer and perhaps it's because I find too many inanimate and ephemeral things to have cultural and timely value.
Zinester gatherings like BLTX (acronym for Better Living Through Xerography) - which happens bi-annually - have provided such a perfect opportune for me to become a fully pledged hoarder of ephemera. I never knew there would be a way for me justify my strange sentiments to random pieces of receipts and paper (zines have showed me that there was such a way of design and curation for these things).
Recently at 98B Collaboratory a roundtable event was held called "Taking Care of Your Zines" amongst artists whom are also within the zinester circuits and have collected a plethora of them over the years. Sadly I had missed this roundtable discussion (as I spent a week and a bit gallivanting in Cambodia), because surely as my zine collection is only expected to multiply, I need to find a way of storing them correctly. I remember one artist friend based in Laguna, Czar Kristoff, bringing to SSPACE COFFEE (a roadside café on the way to Tagaytay) transparent duraboxes filled with the zines he gathered from artists and friends all over the world, whilst I am still keeping them in reused paper bags or cellophane pouches.
In another log I'll feature some of these zines and why they interest me. Whilst most times I resort to mindless purchases, I think I'm beginning to have a particular "taste" for specific sort of zines.
