Mike Gunderloy published the first issue of F5 via a run of 50 copies, printed on a double-sided single sheet of paper dated May 4, 1982. While Wikipedia notes that he made Issue 1 ”on a spirit duplicator in his bedroom in a slanshack in Alhambra, California” the issue itself says he was “now at” Hyde Park, the southernmost neighborhood in Boston where his then-partner was pursuing a PhD at Harvard. Dubbing it “a collection of notes on current publications and what-not,” subject to “æditorial whim,” and ending with the Discordian phrase “HAIL ERIS!” in the flipside’s footer, Gunderloy set
Welcome to the Factsheet Five Archive Project. This site is dedicated to making sense of the magazine’s history and legacy and, in that process, share the work of (and ideally network with) some of the amazing editors, contributors, readers, advertisers, and other associates involved with Factsheet Five (F5) from 1982-1998. In those 16 years, much of it pre-www, F5 exemplified that it was “the paragon of network zines” (55) as Stephen Duncombe described it in his groundbreaking 1992 book, explicating pages upon pages of zine reviews, materializing as readers sent in their own zines. While numerous network zines preceded F5