At zine fests these days you’ll spot plenty of exciting publishing projects that are not exactly “classic” zines, but they aren’t exactly artist books either. Amelia Greenhall of Anemone has proposed the term “artist publishing” to describe this not-quite-a-zine but not-quite-a-book territory. For me, “artist publishing” is a capacious term that would include a wide spectrum of publishing activity by artists, but it seems useful to have a specific term for the category of print publications. For now, I’ll refer to it as third thing publishing. There are a handful of preoccupations that characterize this type of artist publishing: materiality, equipment access and maintenance, scope, audience building, and sustainability.
Materiality
Third thing publishing has a higher production value than many zines but isn’t as long or as formal as a book; usually a booklet. Experimentation with formats is balanced with a certain practicality. Like zines, third thing publications generally start their lives as a standard size piece of office paper and make use of consumer-grade binding equipment intended for office settings. You might spot the occasional pamphlet stitch, too. While classic zines might be printed on the cheapest copy paper and artist books might use mouldmade or handmade paper, third thing publishing embraces machine-made paper tailored for the project. Again, third thing publishing tends to seek a balance between what’s practical/affordable for the publisher and what looks/feels fun or unusual for the reader.
Third thing publishing involves a little extra time and effort. A publication might strategically deploy a cutout or a belly band or a round corner; material qualities that make you think “what a nice touch.” There are even some letterpress-printed projects that have a lot in common with the approach of third thing publishing. The corresponding price point for third thing publishing is usually higher than a classic zine, striking a balance between quality and affordability—enabling personal collecting without private wealth.
Equipment access and maintenance
The heyday of zines as we know them coincided with widespread adoption of photocopiers in schools and workplaces, making it feasible to self-publish by stealing copies after hours. The rise of hand-printed artist books (and academic book arts programs) coincided with the ability to salvage letterpress equipment in the 1970s and ‘80s. Third thing publishing is often Riso focused, and that usually involves a salvage operation too. When artists repurpose office equipment, we’re usually asking it to do things it wasn’t designed to do, so the Riso discord server is a wealth of peer-to-peer tips and advice, a lifeline for artists all over the globe who are fixing up duplicators for artmaking.
Equipment ownership and equipment maintenance, alongside equipment sharing and collaboration, are the default in third thing publishing — and not just for print. Most Riso printers need light bindery equipment, like stitchers, collators, and tabletop stack cutters. The entire setup can still fit in an apartment, enabling lower overhead costs.
Scope
Historically, zines have had defined genres (perzines, fanzines, cookzines) and often very specific audiences. Zinesters might use a zine/artist name or produce an ongoing/serialized project, only sometimes describing themselves as a press or distro. In third thing publishing, press names and clearly defined publishing scopes are common but paired with larger (and less elite) audiences. For instance, Anemone focuses on DIY culture and the climate, Midtones Photo Magazine spotlights photographers of color across mid-America, and our own press, Late Night Copies, publishes informal research-based writing on a handful of subjects.
Audiences
Scope goes hand-in-hand with audience. Third thing publishing is curious about specific topics. Audiences are interested in those topics or invested in independent publishing—or, ideally, both. (These are typically not the institutional or wealthier individual collectors of artist books.) Crucially, there is an entry point into these third thing projects even if you’re not an artist/zinester/publisher yourself. Third thing publishing deliberately cultivates a readership, and readers are often future contributors and collaborators. Publishers connect directly with readers at fests and fairs and through webshops, subscriptions, workshops, launch parties, social media, newsletters, fundraisers, and participatory projects. Third thing publishers speak about their work, teach, participate in exhibitions, contribute publications to reading rooms, etc. Third thing publishers consign and wholesale and, with print runs of 100–1,000, may push against the limits of what an individual can circulate without a distributor.
Sustainability
Third thing presses are interested in sustainable creative labor. They want to cover their costs, maybe pay their contributors, maybe pay themselves, and have money for the next project. With some notable exceptions, most publishers break even. Many share business strategies with one another and reject the idea they are competing with one another. The goal is to grow the audience for everyone. At the point of sale, readers may not understand how the costs of equipment and compensating contributors means a publisher might just break even on a $12 or $15 or $20 publication. Third thing publishers must balance labor, equipment, and materials costs with the reality that readers who buy indie publications have limited disposable income.
In Conclusion
I would appreciate having a word to describe a publishing practice that results in something that is not quite a book and not quite a zine. If you would too, leave a comment or write your own blog post to keep the conversation going.
Thanks to Melissa Murch-Rodriguez and Rachel Hays for their thoughts, which are integrated into this essay, and Aiden Bettine, who helped me write it on a long road trip to (what else?) a zine fest.
A longer version of this essay first appeared in the newsletter Papereaters.
India Johnson is a Minneapolis-based artist. Along with Aiden Bettine, Johnson runs Late Night Copies Press and a new community print shop, the Workshop for Independent Publishing.
