Punk Arrives

Rise of the Fanzines

The fanzine originated in Science-Fiction fandom in the early 1930s. After World War II, specialized mimeographed catalogues of records for sale started to appear, mostly jazz and blues, but also some classical. These lists started to include reviews, letters, criticism and infighting, slowly evolving into specialized amateur music magazines throughout the 1950s. In the early to mid-1960s, similar catalogues starting appearing specializing in doo-wop, surf music, first generation rock & roll and R&B, and subsequently mid-sixties British Invasion and garage rock. Two of the earliest rock & roll fanzines devoted to contemporary acts were Boston’s Crawdaddy and San Francisco’s Mojo Navigator, both appearing in the Spring of 1966. And some rock enthusiasts began to celebrate mid-1960s American garage rock—referred to as “punk rock” by collectors and fanzine editors—as rock & roll at its most primeval, noisy and rebellious.

Punk. Published in 15 issues between 1976 and 1979.

New York’s focal point ‘zine was Punk magazine, created by cartoonist John Holmstrom, publisher Ged Dunn, and Legs McNeil. Its first issue published in January of 1976, Punk saw its print run grow exponentially; by late 1976 it was distributed globally.


Fanzines and the Xerox Machine

Punk in its own eyes was a disposable culture. Fanzines, flyers and posters were manufactured cheaply and on the sly. The Xerox machine was king, and the paper stocks used were frequently cheap and unstable. The artworks and paste-ups that constituted the basis for the Xeroxes were more often than not lost, and the ephemeral nature of these artifacts were increased by the transient lifestyles of the key players, whether fans, musicians, writers or artists.


The Xerox Corporation introduced the photocopy machine in 1949. Initially quite an expensive process, it took until about 1969 before photocopy prices dropped below the cost of duplication via mimeographs or offset printing. The machines themselves started dropping substantially in price during the first half of the Seventies. Corner shops, schools, offices and businesses would own a photocopy machine, providing the punk generation with the access needed to publish their own DYI magazines in edition sizes ranging from a handful to a thousand. Once a publication run climbed into four figures, printing offset became much less expensive than photocopying.

Mark Perry published the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue in London during the Summer of 1976, following his attendance of the first Ramones performance in the UK. It rapidly grew in scope and circulation over the course of the twelve issues published before its termination in late 1977. The first edition of number one was 50 copies, the last issue saw a reported print run of 15,000.

Fanzines inspired by Punk and Sniffin’ Glue mushroomed everywhere. Michael Layne Heath’s Vintage Violence, which covered the Washington DC area punk scene in the late 1970s, was just one example.

By 1980, it’s estimated that at least two thousand different punk fanzine titles had been published, usually following the norm of collages, recycled photographs, situationist techniques of detournement (often unknowingly) and the mixture of rub-on, stencil and ransom-note typefaces that originated out of economical necessity and became an aesthetic norm.

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