© Rémi Duquette

In the former Soviet Union, they had samizdat, which means "self-published." It was the clandestine movement of writers who distributed their work in order to avoid the wrath of government censors. Authors made copies of their writing and reproduced them by hand - small political tracts, poems and even entire novels - and passed them on to readers. In North America, we have the zine. Zines are self-published, and the majority are reproduced by photocopier or computer and distributed in small numbers. With their pocket-size format, zines are cheap to produce and can be passed on to friends, traded or sent to readers for the price of postage. Most have very little bookstore distribution or commercial value.

Bibliograph/e, in Mile End, is Montreal's only public zine library. It's also one of the only zine libraries in the country (the other two are inWelland, Ontario and Halifax). Started by four friends in June 2005, Bibliograph/e has a collection of over 500 zines in French and English housed in the Toc Toc Café on Parc. Two of the original founders, Anna Leventhal and Kate Whitehead, operate the library and host events and readings. I spoke with Anna Leventhal one evening about the inspiration behind opening a zine library. She explained that, along with the other three founders, they had so many zines in their personal libraries that they decided to go public. The collection has grown since its inception as it continues to receive new material from zine writers across Canada and abroad.

I was drawn to titles like "Interesting Ant Hills" and
"Bats Want My Girlfriend."

© Rémi Duquette

Zines, Leventhal explained, are a creative medium where "talent isn't even a requirement." There's no financial gain, which "gives people a lot of freedom to write what they want." And, unlike the market-driven publishing industry, there's complete autonomy. In fact, anyone can write a zine.

And, it seems, anyone does.

They range in size from a matchbook to letter-sized paper. Some are overtly political, and filled with wry humour and criticisms of societal norms. "The Big Engine that Could," about SUVs polluting the countryside, is a parody of a classic children's story. "Spending Money is a Beautiful Art" and "All My Dreams Are At Last Realized" mock the pressures on women to be thin, beautiful and glamourous. I was drawn to titles like "Interesting Ant Hills," "All of My Friends are Flakes" and "Bats Want My Girlfriend."

Traditional zines usually consist of photocopied pages stapled together, but many feature beautifully detailed ink drawings bound on handmade paper. For now, the zines can't be borrowed, but there's plenty of reading space at Toc Toc, and there are plans for library memberships with borrowing privileges in the future.

As Leventhal explained, zines have fluid origins, but they arguably have roots in the American subculture inspired by the sci-fi fanzines of the '30s, underground presses of the '60s and punk rock of the late '70s and '80s. While most are quirky, some are raunchy and others completely nonsensical, there's definitely something subversive and intriguing about them.

Zines are not samizdat, nor are they derived from the same attempts to spread strong political messages in a totalitarian state like the former Soviet Union. But they do speak volumes about the need for people to read and tell stories they aren't getting in mainstream publications. And that might just be powerful enough.