The Chapess Zine #5 Launch

We're dead excited to be hosting the launch for the new issue of the Chapess Zine!

Issue 5 features poetry, prose, illustration + photography by Jessie Askinazi, Sara Sutterlin, Suxy X, Inma Lorente, Lauren Cook, Ele-Beth Little, Gabby Guiliano, Cheyenne Sophia and more! Zines will be available on the day to buy and swap as well as info on how to get involved with our next issue.

Drop in for zine making with Cherry Styles in 'the nook' at Nexus Art Cafe from 12pm-5pm and pay a visit to the Zine Library while you're here! Materials provided, but feel free to bring along anything you want to use. Suitable for beginners and zine pros alike - bring your friends!

Find out more about the zine at thechapess.tumblr.com or tweet us @thechapesszine. There's a Facebook event page HERE for you to share with all your friends.

Classification Party

On Saturday we had our classification party, an attempt to sort the collection into a handful of very broad categories. We're re-shelving everything this afternoon so, from tomorrow, it should be ever so slightly easier to find the kind of zines you're interested in. The categories are (Currently - we're open to changing the system!):

- Perzines (Autobiographical zines)

- Arts and crafts, which includes illustration, comics, photography, film, graphic design, fine art - all visual arts, basically

- Activism, which includes LGBT, gender, politics, that kind of thing

- Food and the environment, which includes cooking, veganism, vegetarianism, gardening, eco stuff, fair trade, animals and travel as well

- Creative writing, which includes poetry and short stories

- Sports - all the football and rugby league zines we have

- Music

- Other - as you would expect, most of the zines in the collection don't fit into these categories so the 'other' section is understandably large

These categories aren't perfect or very precise, but we think they'll be a useful guide when browsing the shelves. Obviously we'd encourage you to look at absolutely everything, but we understand if you don't have a spare few days to read every zine in the collection!

Thanks to all the people who came to help us sort the zines into categories. Thanks to Stef Bradley for making the posters and to Cherry Styles for taking some lovely photos of everyone hard at work. Enjoy!

Classification Party

It has been scientifically proven that adding the word 'party' to anything automatically makes it sound more fun. So here we are attempting to make sorting things into a vaguely logical order sound exciting. On January 18th we have hired the little room at Nexus Art Cafe and we'd like people to come and help us organise the collection into a handful of very broad categories. We think this will help people to browse the shelves a little bit easier.

All the information is available on the Facebook event page. Please feel free to share the event with your pals! You don't have to commit or anything, you can just pop in for a few minutes if you happen to be in the area. There's sure to be some nice people to talk to about zines and whatever else you like talking about. And you can have a cup of tea and a slice of cake while you're at it. Check out the super cool poster below, as designed by the extremely talented Stef Bradley of Today Zine fame.

Whether you can come or not, we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support since we took over the library in the summer. Hopefully 2014 will bring lots of exciting new developments for the library! Happy New Year!