Can you smell the still-warm toner? Can you hear the clack of Bostitch long reach staplers? Not long ago we caught wind that an anthology of a seminal punk magazine, long rumored to be in the works, was in the final stages of becoming a reality. Then this week we were sent an announcement about a gallery exhibition and fanzine market in California starting up this weekend. Zines are definitely in the air this winter.

On the first count, Ian Christe, founder of the Bazillion Points publishing house and author of both Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal and Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga, confirmed the pending reality of Touch and Go Fanzine: The Complete Years.

"Yes," Christe said Wednesday of the book's existence. "We updated our site today after just seeing the latest draft of the book." According to Christe the book will be 576 pages, "but softcover/hardcover remains undetermined."


The anthology will be released in the summer and will collect all of the twenty-two issues in the Touch and Go series, released between 1979 and 1983, in "one loud, fast volume." Along with the original interviews, photographs and musings on punk, industrial and indie rock will be new essays by the magazine's founders Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson, as well as words from Steve Miller, Henry Rollins, Chunklet publisher Henry Owings, Forced Exposure scribe Byron Coley, Touch and Go Records co-founder and former Necros bassist Corey Rusk, Fugazi guitarist and Dischord Records co-founder Ian MacKaye, and several others.

"That's not a final book cover," says Christe of the above image, of Negative Approach singer John Brannon, but apparently the "warface and white t-shirt will be the image on the front of the book." Brannon also contributes a preamble essay to the book. We are certainly looking forward to the collection, which is being touted as a "giant brick of punk knowledge" that is "sure to supplant the Uncle John's bathroom reader on every toilet tank in the world," and we're not the only ones--the Facebook page for the anthology has already clocked more than 1700 fans. Considering the publishing history of Bazillion Points, which includes titles like Hellbent For Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook and Only Death Is Real: An Illustrated History of Hellhammer and Early Celtic Frost, it should be nothing short of staggering.

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On the second count, in the nearer future, the Anno Domini Gallery in San Jose is launching the Art Of Zines 2010 exhibition with an opening reception tonight, Friday, February 5th, from 8pm until the wee hours. "Featuring hundreds of zines from basements, bedrooms and midnight copy shops throughout the US and abroad," the exhibition is part art appreciation and part obsessive collector's conference, and will be on view through March 13th.

"We love zines," says the gallery's announcement for tonight's opening. Their reverence is for "those little DIY, cut-and-paste, copied-on-the-cheap, hand-folded, self-distributed gems that continue to surface because someone, somewhere feels the need to express themselves."

There will be dozens of independent magazine publishers and sellers on hand for the opening, with an incomplete list including Marc Arsenault, John Bobst, Silvia Chenault, Michael Foley, Ben Henderson, Chris Kardambikis, M Undead, Yumiko Miyagawa, Tomas Moniz, Kyle Pellet, Mahoney Perkins, Louis Schmidt, Matthew Seigel, Kate Steward & Meagan Zupancic, Cantab Publishing, Faesthetic, Gimme Brains Distro, Islands Fold, Microcosm Publishing, Parking Block Publishing, Razor Cake and TTC.

The evening's live musical entertainment will consist of Adam Lynn's "scrapbook-y collection of mostly melancholy stripped down tunes recalls a wide variety of influences from the raw end of Mogwai's catalogue, to the acoustic balladry of Nick Drake, to the sparse and almost-robotic piano embellishment of Pinback," a solo set by Zoe Boekbinder of Vermillion Lies, and the "part puppet show, part performance art ensemble and part experimental-folk-orchestra" of Corpus Callosum.

SEE ALSO: www.bazillionpoints.com
SEE ALSO: www.galleryad.com

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The LAS Staff
A number of the Lost At Sea staff have worked and continue to work for various publications, both independent and commercial. Often very stifling in their narrow focus, conventional media outlets left our writers hungry for something bigger, more diverse, more communal. More active, because this is the twenty-first century and it makes sense. During it's short life LAS has accomplished many of its goals (but not all) and has in turn set new ones. Everything that we accomplish is through teamwork and cooperation, both with our regular staff writers and with our contributing writers. LAS is nothing short of a collective. Another contrasting point to some of the magazines out there is that we've checked our egos and scene ethics at the door. We welcome anyone and everyone to contribute and cover a wide range of topics. LAS does not follow your guide lines.

See other articles by The LAS Staff.