So yesterday marked my second appearance at a zine fair. Both have them have been as a stallholder, I've never actually been to a zine fair to just look before.
So the last one was the one at Gorman House a few months back. I think I wrote something in this blog about it. I probably enjoyed that one more, and the main reasons were that I had a great table, and I did not have a hangover.
So I had a ticket to the opening of the street art exhibition at the gallery, but I was convinced against going and instead went to a Pantera cover night. This will probably make its way into the next issue so we can talk about that later.
So we can just say I woke up early with a seriously mean hangover. I hadn't even finished making the copies of my zines, so I headed into officeworks to do that. I spent a lot more money than I wanted to on doing that.
At the last zine fair, I made a new pal Viv, her boyfriend came into Officeworks because he had to copy something, so I gave her a lift to the zine fair. She helped me out on my stall. There wasn't much to help out with because people weren't really interested.
I was sitting next to some people who made these prints, they were very fancy and the caught the eye of people coming past my table. Coming into the fair you got a zine that was made specially with a top 5 of different things. I put in a top 5 Canberra releases into mine.
So I went and had a bit of a wander around the stalls and came up with a few zines. I have just pulled a bunch out of my bag so I'm going to write down what I got.
first the zine about the zine fair. Turns out I have a couple of copies.
iZine- 2.0. This was made by a guy David, he's from Katoomba. He came over and asked if I wanted to do a trade. I said of course. He was a really nice guy actually. I showed him the book I made for my Dad's 50th, he was really impressed. I took it along to show some people some of my other writing. I thought there may be some people interested.
So it's this pretty random collection of pictures and crazy articles from newspapers, accompanied by a tape. That's right, tape is on the comeback, see a few posts down, Talking Tapes w/Jerkstore.
On my first wander around I bought this zine called Night Shift, to remember my times on the graveyard shift, that zine's actually quite old, the drawings are amazing and it's really funny I liked that one.
I stopped by the Half Arsed stall and checked that out, they were just across from me, it's a Canberra skate zine, it brought back a lot of memories. They also had the plans for the new belco park which I discussed in my last post. I got issues 1 & 2, they are extremely thick and were only two bucks each.
Another guy came to do a trade, I can't remember his name actually. Stuart I think it might have been. So he did a trade with me, he gave me his zines Grunted Warning 2 and 3, he also gave me a copy of Blackguard (#3), a zine he edits. I picked up issue 2 of that one actually when I was in Adelaide.
Then I went over to the Smells Like Zines distro and met Elouise. She had some great zines there. I gave her a few issues of Capital Eyes, so if you are in Qld and want them, that's the place.
Elouise was super nice, so I bought numerous zines from her. I really like this one "Whenever I see a bearded hobo on the street I'll think of you and smile". It was a bit pricey ($8), but it's more like a real magazine (colour etc) and full of interesting stories.
It makes me want to give America another chance. I did only go there for one week, to one of the worst places, so there's plenty more to see. There's plenty of adventure in that publication.
Also from that table I picked up Nerf Jihad #7 and another one called "How to have an amazingly adventurous life for zero dollars per day". After that little trip around I went back to my seat. Not so many people came by. An older gentleman came and said "hey, you're not doing anything, what's this all about?". I gave him a little explanation about zines and that a lot of people had traveled from out of town to have a stall and he said that's very impressive.
Then the girl opposite me, Tasha, she came and did a trade with me. Her zines are literally full of writing. There are two zines I got- Age and Circumstance and also Cut Up The Old. I had talked to her a little bit on the We Make Zines website which I just joined up to the other day, so it was good to have a friendly face there immediately.
The Sticky table didn't really have anything I was all that interested in which was a little disappointing, there's a lot of stuff on the website I probably would have picked up, but I guess that's a good thing.
So my sister Alison came down to visit. Once she had looked around at the fair I decided it was time to go. I said goodbye to my new pals, and hit the road for Sydney. I dropped her off the Oktoberfest where she claimed she was not going to drink. I wasn't so sure that would happen.
