There is nothing I love more than good -- or even mediocre or bad, but still original -- zines. There's a lot fewer out there these days with this whole internet/blog fad, so I have to champion Microcosm which has spent years helping distribute, compile into books, and often publish some of the best zines out there. One of the driving forces of the zine explosion in the 90s was Seth Freidman's revival of Factsheet Five, a printed zine review/info guide that in the pre World Wide Web days helped feed a worldwide web of zinemakers, mail artists, manifesto makers, diary sharers, and kooks. There are less good zines these days, and there's also way less zine review zines, and some of those out there are pretty dry. Xerography Debt is one of the best, with writers really injecting perosnality into reviews. So out of love for Microcosm and Xerography Debt I'm going to pretend I can't think of any conflict of interest of a publisher publishing a zine that inevitably reviews its other publications. This is me pretending. And enjoying the well-written reviews, and ordering a bunch of zines. Not all of them from Microcosm.
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