Tell us about the days of Print!
I was visiting our friendly locally-owned
sex store recently (have you visited yours? they are happy places) and while browsing through their library suddenly remembered being at
Good for Her in Toronto sometime in 2001. I was looking at their magazines, and there in the rack to my surprise was a well-thumbed copy of a zine I worked on,
Zaftig!. It was a funny feeling, to find something so familiar so far away. It was cool.
Zaftig! Sex for the Well-Rounded, which was the brainchild of
Hanne Blank, was published between 1999 and 2001.
Hanne was the editor, which meant, among other things, plowing through a bizillion badly-spelled and sometimes hilarious submissions, and I--recruited after the first two issues--did everything else, which meant, among other things, Photoshopping beautiful, very naughty art and agonizing over baseline alignment and diacritical marks. Hanne began
Zaftig! with the idea in mind that "no people should be deprived of their own image," and I think we both believed passionately in the worth of what we were doing. Also: our cats were on the masthead.
Unfortunately, the last planned issue of
Zaftig! never happened, although we have as a memorial to the experience this amazing piece of
cover art by
Les Toil, which I conceived as a kind of Russian Constructivist gesture, and I think he succeeded amazingly. I still love this work. I adore our pen-guns.
Zaftig! ultimately helped give birth to two of Hanne's books:
Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica (ed.) and
Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them. The very good news right now is that Ten Speed Press is going to publish a reworked and embiggened version of
Big Big Love, a book for which I think the demand
has only grown in the ten years since it was published.
And you can be part of the new
Big Big Love by taking Hanne's survey that will help inform the book. The link is here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BBL2010survey
The survey is "designed to gather information about the sexual and romantic lives and experiences of people who either identify themselves as fat, who are or have been attracted to fat romantic/sexual partners, or both." So if you fit--tightly or not--into any of these categories, consider taking the time to click through the pages and be part of something important.
Yay books!
I finally sent off a box of zines to the DePaul Library Zine Archives. It is an odd experience, handling their familiar, dog-eared (cliche, sorry), pages. One thing printed matter does that reading online doesn't is carry a collection of physical sensations with it: the thickness of the pages under your fingers; the (sturdy, flimsy) way it's bound and how the pages turn; the smells of inks; the sharpness or blurriness of type; the places it wants to fall open to when you pick it up.So when you reacquaint yourself with something like zines, memories that are physical as well as mental emerge. Handling them put me right back into my state of mind twenty years ago.
Tell us about the days of Print!
Hanne was the editor, which meant, among other things, plowing through a bizillion badly-spelled and sometimes hilarious submissions, and I--recruited after the first two issues--did everything else, which meant, among other things, Photoshopping beautiful, very naughty art and agonizing over baseline alignment and diacritical marks. Hanne began Zaftig! with the idea in mind that "no people should be deprived of their own image," and I think we both believed passionately in the worth of what we were doing. Also: our cats were on the masthead.
Unfortunately, the last planned issue of Zaftig! never happened, although we have as a memorial to the experience this amazing piece of cover art by Les Toil, which I conceived as a kind of Russian Constructivist gesture, and I think he succeeded amazingly. I still love this work. I adore our pen-guns.
Zaftig! ultimately helped give birth to two of Hanne's books: Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica (ed.) and Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them. The very good news right now is that Ten Speed Press is going to publish a reworked and embiggened version of Big Big Love, a book for which I think the demand 
has only grown in the ten years since it was published.
