“One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession was because I’m in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity. . . . There’s a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.”

Zines are most valuable, it seems to me, as documentary artifacts and narratives when written by people who are hard to categorize: strays, self-identified women, men, transgenders, agitators, street people, punks, anyone who didn’t fit neatly in a society that organizes itself in simple binary categories—male or female, Democrat or Republican, black or white, married or single, adult or child. The author of the unusual zine I read had been an unhappy girl, until she started calling herself he and began a course of male hormones. After growing a beard and deepening his voice, but stopping short of surgery, he embarked on a relationship with a transvestite male. The self-identified male with female parts lived with a male who preferred to dress as a female. What were they? A couple. What was he? Even he wasn’t sure, though he felt right. The zine was a record of his unique life, which he felt a responsibility to document.

Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don’t fit our categories?

MARILYN JOHNSON, This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

Image: Barnard Zines