Recently, I found a tiny mini-comic hidden in the stacks at the IPRC, simply titled “What Happened to the Zine Library?”
It was the story of a regular day at the IPRC when Greig, our founding zine librarian, had shelfread and catalogued quite a few zines, but right before he closed up at 10PM, he decided to shelve one more zine. Leaning up to the highest shelf, the 8-foot-tall bookcase gave way, and all of the zines came tumbling down around him.
The next page’s panel was Greig, fists thrown in the air, eyes towards the heavens, exasperatedly saying “ZINES! I give you so much of my time and money, and this is how you repay me?!”
I have never felt so much like a single panel of a mini-comic explained my life. If hashtags had existed when Greig made that zine, it undoubtedly would have been #zinelibrarianproblems
So I’m making a comp zine! I’m looking for anyone who identifies as a zine librarian or ex-zine librarian, to submit short pieces of topical art, stories, mixtape track listings, recipes or even just pages stained with the tears of metadata to my comp zine “Zine Librarian Problems”. Comics about how heavy zine boxes are, donations that include 15-year old syllabuses, explaining what the heck you do to strangers. Please make submissions half-sized (5.5″x8.5″) friendly. Does not need to be new work if you’ve made something that fits in with the zine before. You retain all rights!
Deadline is June 20th, 2014. You can submit by USPS to:
Lillian Karabaic
IPRC
1001 SE Division St, Ste 2
Portland, OR 97202
or by internet mail to: librarian(at)iprc(dot)org
I hope to see your brilliant commiserations!
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Oh, this mini-comic sounds like it perfectly captures the beautiful chaos of zine librarianship—I’ve had my own run-ins with leaning towers of paper that seemed determined to topple. It makes me wonder how many other unsung librarians have similar panels from their daily grind. For anyone dealing with multilingual zines or comics that need translating, I’ve found the Manga Translator surprisingly handy; it keeps the original art clear while swapping out text, which feels like a small but welcome bit of order in the zine stacks.
The chaos of a toppling zine shelf really captures the beautiful, maddening unpredictability of working with physical collections. It makes me wonder how many of us have developed our own quirky systems just to keep things from literally falling apart. For my part, I’ve found that having a searchable reference for even the most niche interests can save a lot of headache—when I’m deep into a game like Grow a Garden 2, I lean on the gag2 wiki to track crop values and mutation combos without losing my mind. There’s something oddly satisfying about turning a pile of data into a tool that actually helps, whether for zines or virtual carrots.
That panel about Greig yelling at the zines made me laugh out loud—I've definitely had those moments where a beloved project just fights back. It's such a perfect little snapshot of the chaos and love that goes into maintaining a zine library, and it makes me wonder how many other hidden gems are tucked away in those stacks. The whole call for submissions feels like an invitation to share those messy, human stories that make zine communities so special. If you're documenting your own library adventures, you might want to remove metadata from AI image before sharing scans, just to keep the focus on the art and not the tech behind it. I'm already thinking about what tiny comic I'd contribute—probably one about the eternal struggle of alphabetizing mini-comics. Can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with!