Goodbye, old friend.
Goodbye, old friend. ZAPP
Zinesters of Seattle, I have some sad news. The Zine Archive and Publishing Project (ZAPP), whose erstwhile Richard Hugo House (RHH) offices once hosted the world’s largest collection of self-published printed materials, is officially dead. The organization parted ways with the Hugo House in 2013, with both sides agreeing that the archive had been woefully de-prioritized. ZAPP then became an independent organization and set out to raise money for a new space and ongoing programs.

In the meantime, the Seattle Public Library (SPL) stored ZAPP’s collection of more than 30,000 zines and self-published materials, though the collection was not available to the public. Unfortunately, ZAPP’s search for a new home has been cut short. Graham Isaac, the project’s managing director, informed devotees and former volunteers of the permanent closure via e-mail yesterday, citing difficulties around the current storage situation.

“There was talk between ZAPP, SPL and RHH of ZAPP continuing essentially as outside borrowers with access to the zines to continue with programming,” he wrote in his e-mail announcing the closure to ZAPP volunteers and supporters, “but after meeting with SPL and subsequent e-mails, it's become clear that the library is unable to meet our requirements for communications. That said, we have decided that the best course of action is to close ZAPP as an official nonprofit.”

The project’s remaining funds will be distributed to a few kindred spirits—Short Run, Hollow Earth Radio, and the Independent Publishing Resource Center—and the collection will stay with SPL. However, this isn’t exactly a happy conclusion to the ZAPP saga.

"The collection was donated by the Richard Hugo House to SPL without ZAPP's knowledge or consent, taking advantage of an veto-option expiration clause in a contract with ZAPP," Isaac explained in the official press release. "Said contract stated that RHH maintained formal ownership of the collection until such a time as ZAPP found a permanent home for it. We were not given a deadline or any indication that this deal was in the works; there was a good-faith agreement that RHH would support ZAPP in its efforts."

RHH Executive Director Tree Swenson disputed that characterization, maintaining that her organization hadn't made any official moves with the collection and would still happily turn it over to ZAPP if it found a suitable home.

"That's definitely a misunderstanding," she said, "[The collection] is super valuable." The dispute, it seems, has to do with ZAPP's ability to access it while it's at the library.

"The library has the collection in storage," Isaac said via e-mail when asked for comment. "Said storage space is being sold, so the collection had to move. We were looking for a space. I got an e-mail in September [from RHH] saying 'Have you found a space yet?' We'd just looked at a space at Washington Hall, but it was too small and too expensive. We offered to store the collection at our own cost and raise the funds for a new spot, and she said no." Swenson explained her organization's main concern was that the collection be stored properly, which she felt the library was best equipped to do.

"As stewards of the collection, we just feel like we've got to make sure it's safe," she said, "not sitting in someone's basement somewhere. We had really wanted to give ZAPP as much time as possible to come up with a safe, secure place for the collection." ZAPP's inability to reach an agreement with the library, she posited, is due to the fact that a large organization like SPL moves at a much slower pace than a small, independent nonprofit.

"We all wish it had been able to move faster," she said. "[SPL] can't put it front and center because they have so many other things they have to deal with."

Isaac doesn't buy it. "We presented the library with requests for communication guarantees, and they are unable to meet them," he responded. "This may be because they are a large organization, but we can't be expected to work under those circumstances."

The end result is the same either way, Isaac said: ZAPP is definitely shutting down. And that's definitely a travesty.

As Paul Constant wrote in his piece on the original ZAPP/RHH breakup, “ZAPP has always been more than just a storehouse of paper—it was also a space where young people could get together to make their own zines, attend workshops, and hang out.”

That was certainly my experience there. I first encountered the archive as a teenager, when the group of scruffy punks I’d met in the park needed somewhere to roll a joint out of the rain. I was pretty skeptical that we'd be allowed to waltz in, plop down on a couch, and twist one up, but they were confident. That confidence was not misplaced.

ZAPP was just that kind of place. It was all the way open to the public, a space that allowed dumb kids to be their dumb selves without judgment, which is perhaps why so many wayward youths flocked to it. The only thing it ever really asked of you was that you appreciate its vast archives of self-published print material and refrain from spilling coffee on anything.

Given a little more age and wisdom, I would have spent that afternoon plumbing the vast depths of the archive, rather than idly browsing a couple comics to pass the time until we could go find an eave under which to spark up. Thankfully, that first visit piqued my curiosity, and I returned to ZAPP as a volunteer later in life, inspired to get involved by my own amateurish forays into skateboarding zines.

My old skate zines, now living somewhere in the depths of the Seattle Public Library system.
My old skate zines, now living somewhere in the depths of the Seattle Public Library system. Daniel Lint

I owe ZAPP more thanks, I think, than it owes me for volunteering. While I did do a bit of cataloguing and even mentored a kindly high school student from Bellevue, I mostly sat around drinking too much drip coffee and reading as many different zines as humanly possible. Those were amazing days, even if I was too young to understand quite how amazing. The zines I made and encountered at ZAPP proved to be intellectually formative in a way I couldn’t begin to understand then, and am only just coming to appreciate in hindsight.

For starters, I think I’m one of the few Seattle skateboarders under 35 lucky enough to have ever read the first issue of Pool Dust, one of the founding documents of our city’s skate culture. It gave me a respect for the culture and tradition of skateboarding that’s severely lacking in today’s teenage skate rats, whose historical knowledge extends about as far as the last Instagram clip they watched.

Then there’s the fact that ZAPP's collection included a large number of LGBTQ zines. Lord knows I wasn’t getting any information on queer culture from my skate buddies, other than it was not a thing you wanted to be involved in. Being exposed to writing by out queer people via ZAPP was crucial in making sense of my own queerness. The zines I read there weren't anything like the stereotypical portrayal of gay men that had been sold to me by society, and reading about the wildly varied experiences of actual queer people made me realize my own experiences might not be so strange. It was the first step I took down the road toward figuring out that I could be queer and still be part of the skate community I so cherished.

Perhaps the most important zine I stumbled across was, of all things, a massive tome mailed in from somewhere in Southeast Asia, whose title I kick myself every day for forgetting. It was about two inches thick, held together with one of those cheap plastic bindings they use for course packets at community college, and it was filled to the brim with pasted photos and bits of notepaper that gave little indication of the gripping story it contained.

Its author had, upon his best friend’s death, retreated from civilized society. He’d traveled to the most remote part of Thailand he could find, and spent his days there living a spartan, survivalist life in the jungle, foraging for edible plants, partaking of intense yoga sessions, and documenting it all in a little notebook. He only returned to town occasionally for supplies, and kept mostly to himself in a tiny hut by the beach when he did. He was obviously a little out there, but he was by no means unhinged. His scrawled notes and photo captions were quite lucid, almost amounting to something of a modern day, multimedia version of Walden.

I always wondered why he made and mailed in the zine, instead of just living the experience. It wasn’t until years later, after I’d lost my own best friend and spent a long stretch struggling to deal with it, that I realized why. That zine was an object lesson in the importance of expressing one's grief rather than bottling it up. His feelings of loss were burning him up on the inside, and all the yoga and survivalism in the world weren’t enough to get them out. So, too, were all the solitary, late-night parking garage skate sessions for me. Thanks to that zine, I knew from the moment my friend died that I had to write something if I ever wanted to get right with it.

The collection, which spans everything from feminist perzines to filthy comics to punk rants, is truly a treasure trove of ideas. You might not be looking for an unconventional primer on grief, but you are almost guaranteed to find something that will surprise you.

“ZAPP's shelves are stuffed with stories that are told nowhere else—not on blogs, not in history books, not in public records, not anywhere,” Paul wrote, back in 2013. “These are the voices of people who were disenfranchised and angry and sad and excited, in a time when publication was a barrier that kept the poor and the young and the dissenters from making their voices heard.”

Indeed, zines are fascinating artifacts of pre-internet memetics, and preserving them is vitally important. Zines—and the culture of sharing and exchange that grew up around them—are the original social media, and they carry a weight of meaning that digital social media seems to be unable to recreate. Instead of brief and often alienating glimpses into someone’s well-curated life, I’ve found them to be windows into the soul, ones that create powerful feelings of sympathy and understanding with authors from all walks of life. Society could clearly use more of that right now.

Thus, I’m happy to report that access to the zines will be mostly maintained.

"On the upside, the zines will be safe, and eventually available to the public and browsable once again," Isaac's press release read. "SPL has begun assessment of the collection and will be deciding the exact where's and how's of making the zines publicly available as this process goes on. We are cautiously optimistic that SPL will do this incredible collection justice."

I'm not so happy that ZAPP's efforts to fundraise and find their own space will be cut short. Given the stiff competition for attention spans nowadays—both within the library and in general—it's more important than ever for an organization like ZAPP to curate, promote, and advocate for the collection. ZAPP’s greatest work wasn’t, as Paul pointed out, running a U-Store-It for zines. It was getting people—especially young people—excited about zines. It was giving them a way to express all their fiery, crazy feelings. It was facilitating the exchange of otherwise marginalized ideas. And now, it’s over.