Quick answers on photocopying, being free and the 'aesthetics' of fanzines

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a Manchester-based design student named Jenn Trethewey who is currently doing research into self-publishing, with a view to producing a map charting the overlaps between different types of formats in self-publishing. She asked me a number of questions about photocopying, the Shrieking Violet being free and the aesthetics of self-publishing. You can read her questions, and my answers, below:

JT: Why, when you started the Shrieking Violet, did you choose to photocopy and have a free fanzine?

SV: I'm afraid I won't really give you any passionate, ideological answers, as the way I publish mostly comes down to laziness and convenience.

I started off photocopying the the Shrieking Violet because of the immediacy – I could go from finalising the content to publishing and distributing it almost immediately. As there was no waiting around for printers or anyone else to deliver a finished product, it was all up to me.

It is very important to me that the fanzine is free so that it is accessible. Having a cost on it – even a small one, is a barrier to the casual reader picking it up. Also, if there was a cost, selling it would have to be regulated somehow – I wouldn't be able to leave it around to be picked up. Again, the process of distribution would lose its immediacy if some kind of transaction had to take place – it would limit where and how it was available.

The Shrieking Violet was conceived as an alternative guide to Manchester, as there are number of free city guides which are left around the city – in hotels, cafes, bars and other attractions. It seems that most of them are sponsored by big business and are very unimaginative – they mainly recommend shopping, or visiting the big city museums and galleries if you want some culture. I wanted to offer an alternative to that which was also free and could just be picked up in some of those public places, but gave a guide to things in the city which were free.

JT: Why, sixteen issues in, have you kept it that way?

SV: I would love to publish a fanzine on lovely paper with staples and make it a nice object to hold. There are a number of reasons why I haven't, most of which come down to laziness:

1. There are always mistakes and typos in the Shrieking Violet, however hard I try to proofread it. It doesn't matter quite so much so much if it is just photocopied, as a photocopy feels like a temporary object, but a properly printed publication would feel much more 'permanent' and I would want everything about it to be perfect.

2. Photocopied fanzines are quick, cheap and easy to reproduce – if I got a fanzine printed professionally it would be limited by print run and it would be harder to produce extra copies as and when needed if I ran out.

3. As i'm not really from an art and design background, I feel a bit overwhelmed by all the choice of different papers and qualities and ways of printing as I have never had something professionally printed before, but I do know how to use a photocopier. I grew up around my dad's collection of early 80s punk/indie zines, so I knew that photocopying was a long-established way of making fanzines!

4. Cost – it's important to me that the Shrieking Violet is free, and if I got it printed professionally I would need the money to do so, which would probably mean applying for funding, or asking for people to advertise, which would be another stage in the process of making the fanzine that would hold the process up.

So, in answer to your question about why I continue to photocopy the Shrieking Violet 16 issues in, it is about momentum – I decided momentum and keeping the project going (firstly as a monthly zine then bi-monthly, now quarterly) was more important than worrying about improving the print quality.

I would love to produce the Shrieking Violet in colour, but I have struck a balance by having a pdf version online which is in colour – and the vast majority of readers are online, important as it is to have a paper version as well.

JT: I'm looking at the boundaries of different self-publishing formats and how we define them, so I'd be interested from a zine creator's point of view, what do you think makes a zine a zine? Would you say this sort of aesthetic and free distribution is part of what a fanzine is? Or is it the content and motivation behind the publication which you feel defines it?

SV: Regarding content and motivation, I like to think you could call the Shrieking Violet either a fanzine or a magazine. The distinctions between fanzines, artists' books and magazines are often a lot less clear than is made out. I would prefer for the Shrieking Violet to be defined by the content and the quality of the writing inside it rather than how it is delivered. The content and standard of the writing and range of contributors is always the most important thing and not the format it is made in. Just like blogs – I feel they should be judged by the quality of their content just like any other website and not by the medium in which they exist.

I don't know if I can define what makes a fanzine a fanzine as they vary so much. I'm not sure there is an 'aesthetic' that can be linked to fanzines as they range from the very, very basic – handwritten and photocopied – to more 'crafted' artists' books. I have thought about this a lot over the past couple of years, and I have come to the conclusion that 'self-publishing is a far more helpful word/concept than 'fanzine' because it is much broader and encompasses many different types of publications and many reasons for publishing, but the thing that often unites them all is autonomy and the freedom to be your own editor and maker.

Jenn's blog: http://ideasandthat.tumblr.com

Carol Batton: “Two things people don’t know about me are that I’m from Salford and I’m sixty.”

Given out sheet by sheet, hand to hand around the Northern Quarter for nearly three decades, Carol Batton’s poems are an everyday, but unique, part of Manchester’s cultural fabric. They have the ability to surprise you, to make you smile, and generally make the experience of living in the city nicer. They’re part what gives a place its individuality.

Today Carol turns sixty but, rather than using this interview (which took place a few days beforehand) to reflect on that milestone, she’s keen to find a new, original angle on her work. After I sit down at a table in the Night & Day, where we’ve arranged to meet*, she decides that this should be an anti-technology diatribe and comes up with an impromptu list of criticisms:

“Computers and mobile phones are something you pay to get rid of. I can’t see why people want the following:

Viruses
Trojan horses
Phishing with a ‘P’
Fraud (credit card)
Emails from people who may want to destroy your computer
‘Sorry you can’t have that page’
Antivirus treatment
Emails about the health service and what they’re going to do to you.”

A keen gardener, she concludes indignantly: “I would rather be watering a plant than giving a computer power.”

Despite this, and not even having an email account, she has used a family computer to search for me online, and recognised me when I walked in because I have joined the Carol Batton appreciation society on facebook (388 members at the last count).

Although she is the Northern Quarter’s unofficial resident poet (she explains “ninety per cent of people in Manchester have been to the Northern Quarter and it’s a creative area. I wouldn’t hand my poems out in Marks and Spencer”), Carol came to poetry relatively late, prompted by being prescribed lithium in 1983. This was a pivotal moment in her life: “I went on medication; first it sent me to sleep and then I started jotting down poetry.

“The medication is by far the worst thing that ever happened to me but it gave me poetry.”

Carol has an impressive range of hobbies and interests, and has experimented with a range of career options, including studying art at teacher training college: “I knew I wanted to be famous when I was at school. I tried tightrope walking at twelve and ballet dancing in the garden — anything to be famous! I didn’t want to be a hairdresser!”

She’s also enthusiastic about hill walking, dancing, tai chi and rare birds and can name all the flowers, trees and fungi, explaining she writes about “anything apart from love, surprisingly”. She says: “You have to be a polymath to be a poet. You have to know what you’re writing about if it comes up.”
Making up for the late start as a poet, Carol has been extraordinarily prolific. At one time she was writing up to a poem a week (now it’s more like one a month) and she estimates she has distributed 100,000 sheets of poems around Manchester, first reproduced by risograph and now photocopied at Marc The Printers on Edge Street.

“This is a how a poem comes about. I’m looking out of my window or I’m walking along in the rain. I’m looking at flowers and I’ve got a first line which is usually very good and I take a second or third line and if it’s looking good I take out my notebook — I’ve usually got two or three. Then I try it out with a couple of friends and they say ‘wow wow wow’ or ‘no no no’.”

The final poem is turned into a master copy, either typed or handwritten on paper (so “it cannot vanish out of existence easily”), which Carol refers to as CRC (camera ready copy) ready to be printed. These pages then comprise ‘stock’, added to poems from the past ten to fifteen years which have proved popular and stood the test of her time, which is kept in the Oklahoma bag she carries with her — something Carol describes as ‘like my shop’. As the thick pile indicates: “There are an awful lot I can lay my hands on.”

Carol is well-known for giving out her poems on the street: “I accost people and it’s very random but my poems give me a form of recognition for a stranger, they’re a ‘hello’, an introduction that establishes me. There’s an astonishing reaction to stuff. People like the short poems on card and they like the long, lyrical poems. I get accosted by strangers three times a day. ”

Carol once described herself as a samizdat poet, drawing a parallel with clandestine self-publishers evading censorship in Soviet states under oppressive regimes. “It is mass produced but it is not formally processed. It is handed out individual to individual. It is hand made and passed around by hand — I manually control it. It is self-publishing, my style.”
In 1990, Carol started memorising poems and performing at an open mic night called the New Troubadors, amongst a group that also included Bryan Glancy who was the inspiration for the title of Elbow’s album The Seldom Seen Kid. She has also performed at the Royal Northern College of Music with Stephen Fretwell, but she admitted: “It scares me. People think you just stand there and feel important but you’re panicking. You have to throw poetry in the air and catch the audience.”

Although Carol claims ‘TV and the newspapers don’t want me’, she has also been published in many magazines and appeared on two records. In 1999, Carol met Andy Votel of Twisted Nerve Records, who recorded her for the spoken word compilation Twisted Words, where she appeared on vinyl in the company of Billy Childish and Malcom Mooney, and for the album Folk is Not a Four Letter Word.

Carol has been looking forward to turning sixty: “I’ve waited for it and I deserve it!” But she has acknowledged it’s time to slow down, and is returning to planting seeds (“I very much like flowers. I’m digging them in as fast as I can”), deciding this is a good note on which to end our interview:

“I’m going from poetry, printing and publishing to petunias, planting and pansies in my old age.”

* Grateful thanks to my friend Richard Barrett, poet, writer and fellow Carol Batton fan, who first offered to interview Carol Batton for the Shrieking Violet some time ago, then decided I should interview her, then patiently set this interview up whilst we umed and ahed about who would do it.

Ghosts in the Machine: Maurice Carlin’s ‘The Self Publishers’, found art from photocopiers

Every two months, Maurice Carlin does a sweep around the photocopying shops of Manchester and Salford, gathers unwanted copies that are left on the glass or discarded around the machines, enlarges them to A3 and collects them into a publication about the cities and the people who live in them called The Self Publishers. As well as including what you’d expect to find scattered around the shops — maps, adverts for rooms to rent, posters for missing pets, failed attempts at reproducing academic texts, sheet music, even a poem by Manchester poet Carol Batton who distributes her photocopied works around the city — some of the material is surprisingly personal. Since it started late in 2009 The Self Publishers has constituted a city-wide scrapbook or diary, with letters and children’s drawings popping up next to Primark pay slips and to do lists. In September Morry exhibited the work at the Pigeon Wing Gallery in London and he was also invited to take the project to Midnight Coffee Preview in Antwerp in December. The Shrieking Violet had a chat with Morry at Islington Mill, where he is based.

SV: What inspired the project? Were people's leftover bits of paper something you had been interested in for a while?

MC: I mistakenly took some stuff that had been left behind in a copy shop and I had it around for a while — I do tend to collect stuff. Sometimes you have something and you don’t know why you’re interested in it then later you realise why. Then later I thought ‘maybe all I need to do is present it differently.’.

I’m interested in the photocopier as a format as it’s democratic — it reduces everything to a black and white image and flattens it all out. Even glossy magazine articles are reduced to a bit of text.

SV: What are the most common mistakes that are made when photocopying?

MC: There are quite often bits missing, pages the wrong size or copies are too light or too dark. In one copy someone’s hand somehow got in there. But the bits that have gone wrong are more interesting.
SV: It’s interesting that you’ve chosen to call the publications The Self Publishers (and chosen quite a decorative font for the title, in contrast to the mainly functional nature of what's inside), as the people who made these copies probably didn’t intend to publish to a wider audience — with a few possible exceptions, I imagine most of the copies were made for personal use.

MC: It is accidental publishing. It would be quite different if I collected all the material I found on the street like scraps of paper — it is found in a place of publication and reproduction. Even if it is being reproduced for one person it is still being reproduced and published.

SV: What interests you about looking through these unwanted documents from other people’s lives?

MC: I’m interested in how meaning is formed. The material I collect is both mundane and vital. A lot of it is things that are really important to people, for example propaganda — people copying 100 posters saying ‘Say no to the English Defence League’— or forms motivating people to do something. It’s a document of a moment just gone. I take all these different narratives and put them back to back.

I’m interested in Chantal Mouffe and the idea of agonistic democracy. The public sphere should be based on dissensus rather than consensus. We should be a community of difference rather than a community of one and acknowledge our differences and that we can still get things done.
SV: What’s the most interesting or surprising thing you’ve found?

MC: There are grievance forms about being sacked, documents relating to harassment and someone’s personal fitness report. Some of it is copyrighted material, and there’s an article about JD Salinger suing Random House and copyright law. There’s a seating plan for a bar mitzvah party which I love as it’s really visual and pages with random letters at the top — I don’t know what they are but they remind me of concrete poetry.

SV: Do you feel voyeuristic, like you’re looking at something you’re not supposed to? What if you were looking through a copy and you found something of yours staring back at you?

MC: The ethics of it is something I’ve thought a lot about. It was a shock when I came across someone’s death certificate. Sometimes I’ve blocked out names and personal information but sometimes it’s an essential part of that story. It’s an internal seesaw but there’s something about wanting to present the material in its purest form.

We leave a trail behind us all over the place — online, on social networking sites. There’s a residue of human activity everywhere and artists are among the few people who take an interest in it and find it poetic. They sift through the refuse to find something that says something about people and what they care about and what they don’t care about and leave behind.

SV: How do you go about putting the material together? Apart from adding a cover and stapling the material together, is there an editing process?

MC: In one way you could look through this and think that it’s a random jumble of stuff one after the other but in the way I do it there is a kind of mechanism. Some people suggested I should take the text and put it into some kind of design format but there is a sensibility. It follows a sort of rule of publishing, for example when I have found an abstract, introductory remarks or contents list I put that at the front and when I have found acknowledgements, conclusions and evaluations or indexes they have gone at the back, even if they didn’t relate to what’s inside. But in other ways it makes no sense at all and things don’t really belong together. It could be quite a surreal experience to read through from the front cover but I always want to find the narrative thread — that’s a natural instinct.

It’s a bit like reading a newspaper, which has a design aesthetic but apart from that it’s a jumble of different information, reports and trivia.SV: If there is too much duplication in the material you collect do you limit what you put in?

MC: I use 90 per cent of the material I find, for example there were four copies of the same photograph but each one was slightly different so someone had obviously been trying to get something right and they were failed attempts. I put them all in.

SV: Don’t you find it frustrating that you only have a part of the story when you include a page that is just one part of a longer article, for instance? Don’t you ever find that there’s a page or scrap that interests you so much that you want to go away and read more?

MC: Through one page you can read a whole story about what might have happened. It reflects my own reading habits — I have five or six different things on the go at once and quite often only read a page or a paragraph at one time. I like that I’ve only got a section of the story or a part of it and you have to fill in the rest yourself.

It’s quite in tune with life, which is full of different voices and sources for information and knowledge constantly competing for your attention. I don’t really want to read all of them but I will take in something of all of them.
SV: How does the project work in other cities?

MC: I had no idea if it would translate into a different place. In Antwerp I had to make more of a choice when deciding which material to put in. There was more material in English than I had expected and I chose more in English than was perhaps representative.

I was really surprised the things I found related so directly to the place. Lots of the material related to Antwerp, for example one person wrote an abstract about Antwerp as a port town.

Someone suggested I should go ask copy shops for the material. I went in to shops and asked if they had any old paper they were going to dump. There’s less suspicion of that kind of thing there and they handed a pile over. I asked copy shops when I got back to Manchester and they said they couldn’t possibly give it out for confidentiality reasons. There is more openness and transparency in Antwerp.

I also spent some time at the Middlesex University Philosophy Department occupation in May and June and did an edition there as they were producing lots of material related to the occupation.

SV: Is there a noticeable difference between material collected from copy shops in different areas of Manchester and Salford and do you have a favoured photocopying shop?

MC: It is a barometer of what’s going on around the copy shop. What you find in Staples in Salford is different to what you might get in the Northern Quarter. The ones on Oxford Road are the best for collecting material as they’re really untidy.

SV: How do other people react to the project?

MC: People either love it or hate it. I’m not sure that the project really works in a gallery setting though. It would work much better if you could buy it like any other magazine.

To purchase a copy of The Self Publishers email Morry at deaddigital@islingtonmill.com.

www.islingtonmillartacademy.blogspot.com