A Collection-Inspired Zine

I made a zine inspired by the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection (and you can too!). 

A zine (pronounced zeen) is a small magazine that is independently published, usually produced inexpensively and usually for a small audience. 

Zines have century-old roots in sci-fi fandom and social movements as tools for sharing art and information within communities whose voices are not amplified through traditional media. Their low cost and freedom from traditional publishing regulations make them an accessible and easy-to-produce print object. 

My goal for this zine was to reflect the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection in just 8 pages, which is kind of a lot to ask of my little zine, but here’s how it went. 

Subject 

I wanted to create prints inspired by collection materials, with the goal of showing the breadth of the collection. Knowing that I could only represent the smallest sliver, I identified specific items to represent Shakespeare history, performance history, printed books, manuscripts, and realia (objects). 

I reproduced an image of the Folger Shakespeare Library bookplate for the front cover. 

For the first internal panel, I used the “To the Reader” text from Ben Jonson’s poem inside the First Folio, the first printed text that appears in the book. It feels significant to me that the first words in the Folio are not by Shakespeare. Instead, Jonson, a contemporary and admirer of Shakespeare is addressing us, the readers. Thus, in the first printed words, we don’t just find Shakespeare, but we also immediately find community. 

In my work as a reference associate, I rarely talk to Shakespeare directly, but I frequently talk to and participate in this community of readers that stretches centuries, united by our collective interest and engagement with print history and theatre history, with stories and culture at large.  

To represent theatre and Folger history, following To the Reader is a print inspired by the Folger Shakespeare Library Elizabethan theatre. 

Next is a woodcut from the incunable Ortus sanitatis, a natural history encyclopedia. Our Senior Photography Associate William introduced me to these mer-rabbits, and they continue to delight and inspire me, so they get a double-page spread. 

To represent manuscripts, I included a flower from the Trevelyon miscellany (my version came out a little Muppet-y, but I love him all the more for it). Last, to represent realia, I chose this 17th century memento mori ring. 

Printing 

To create the illustrations, I used linocut printing, though you could also draw, paint, collage, etc. Linocut printing is a type of relief printing in which you carve away the negative space from a linoleum block, leaving a raised surface that can be inked and pressed to paper to produce an impression. You can read more about relief printing and other printmaking techniques here: Woodcut, engraving, or what? | Folger Shakespeare Library. 

This process starts with a reference image on paper. Once I had my reference image, either drawn or printed from the computer, I would trace over the image onto tracing paper using a pencil. Finally, I would place the tracing pencil-side down onto a block of linoleum and use a bone folder to rub the graphite onto the block. This creates a mirror-image of your design – the image will be reversed when printed. 

Finally, the white space is carved away, leaving only the lines of the design in a raised surface, ready to be inked and printed. 

Basically, the end result is I made a bunch of stamps. 

How To Fold A Zine 

I used this method of folding one sheet of 8.5”x11” standard printer paper to produce my mini zine: how to fold a mini zine in 6 easy steps. This method creates a total of 8 panels, or for my purposes, a front cover, back cover, and 6 interior panels. (There are plenty of resources online that detail how to create and fold zines; the Library of Congress’s research guide and all of Bre’s YouTube channel are great places to start). 

Final Steps 

After deciding on the layout and printing my impressions, for the last panel, I wrote out a bibliography in pen to cite the call numbers that inspired the prints. This was the last step to creating a master copy of my zine. 

From here, I unfolded the zine to lay it flat and used a copy machine to print 5 copies. I folded each copy using the same method as above and – ta da! – a limited run of Folger-inspired zines.