In Conversation: Twenty Years of a Punk Cookbook Zine

For twenty years, one person has published a cookbook zine of cheap vegan recipes. We talked about all of it.

We met at the back table of a print night, where they were trimming a stack of covers with a paper cutter that should probably be retired. The conversation started there and moved to a café when the shop closed.

How it started

• First zine: a photocopied tour diary
• Favorite tool: a long-reach stapler from 1987
• Print run: usually 100, sometimes 30
• Where to find them: the collective's lending shelf

Asked what advice they would give someone making their first zine, the answer came fast: finish it. A finished bad zine teaches you more than a perfect one that lives in a folder on your desktop.

Finish it. A finished bad zine beats a perfect folder.

What keeps them going

The recording ran for almost two hours. What follows is edited for length and for the parts where we both got distracted by the café's very good cat.

We keep a guest book by the door. Some people write their name, some write a poem, and one person drew the entire floor plan of the shop from memory. It is the best zine we have never printed.

If something here doesn't work for you, write in. Half of our how-tos have been corrected by readers, and the corrections are always better than the original.