“The underground is not a tight, formalized, and coherent social grouping with firm boundaries; instead it is a nongeographical sprawl which must be mapped out” (57) -Stephen Duncombe, Zines: Notes From Underground The final five issues of F5 spanned three and half years, from February 1995 (not September as mistakenly mentioned in an earlier post) to July 1998. Smack in the middle of these final five issues, in 1997, Stephen Duncombe published Zines: Notes From Underground with Verso Press. Duncombe’s book is by far the most influential book on zines (more than 1,500 citations) and for good reason: it carefully
Mike Gunderloy often hosted large parties at his house in Rensselaer, just across the Hudson from downtown Albany, or as his party flier described it, from “the bowels of the [New York] state government.” He would convene dozens of self-publishers from all over the northeast, including the late Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), David Greenberger ( Duplex Planet ), anarchist Bob Black (who had been thrown out of certain parties), and Pagan Kennedy (Pagan’s Head). Archived ephemera include a single-page mailed invitation, a sign-in sheet, as well as letters of regret and thanks. One letter from this time reports an
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