Factsheet Five Archive Project

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Catalog and Other Whole Earth Publications, Taking You from 1970 to 2002 Today, if you want to get started in home brewing, shop for a synthesizer, find out what cybernetics is, order non-genetically-modified seeds, start your own mushroom farm, learn how to repair a Volks...

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Catalog and Other Whole Earth Publications, Taking You from 1970 to 2002

Ahh!!! @caboosezine.bsky.social beat me to the post, so I'm just tagging @jwluther.bsky.social , @marc-fischer.bsky.social and @kirstenleenaars.bsky.social to amp this up. It's going to be such a good conversation.

#zines #milwaukee #mke #factsheetfive

Screenshot of "Start a Zine!" episode three of the Starting a Riot podcast.

Just discovered "Start a Zine!" an episode of the podcast Starting a Riot about the history & legacy Riot Grrrl. This episode features interviews w/ Ramdasha Bikceem & Mimi Thi Nguyen: play.cdnstream1.com/s/opb/starti....

In November 2025, I started an open editable document titled Art Book Fair / Zine Fest Public Sales Transparency. You can find it here: https://l1nk.dev/ArtBookFairSales. It gives publishers a space to share events they were in, what it cost to participate, how much they sold, and more on how it went, Event organizers often survey participants to gather this information on their own but the data they collect is not shared with the public. I wanted to make something everyone could see, use, and learn from. Book fair and zine fest costs can include travel, table fees, food, lodging, shipping and other expenses, The more data publishers add to the doc, the better others can try to understand if an event is worth the time and expense. There are many non-monetary benefits and reasons for participating in events (meeting people, sharing your work, visiting a new city, and building community). But this document should help others think about the economic dimension with care as they plan for fairs and think about what publishing means for them. In a discussion about Art Book Fair / Zine Fest Public Sales Transparency, some people commented that they sell very little at fairs, possibly because they are just starting out or finding their audience. I wanted to give them a pep talk, but there are so many factors involved with selling books and zines. Everyone has fairs that go badly or publishes things that don’t sell as easily as they had hoped. Still, there are some themes that emerge. As a fun way to try to diagnose why things don’t always work out, I created this list of possible reasons that attendees aren’t buying books. This text is informed by many years of tabling at book fairs and zine fests in the US as well as internationally. I hope people will take it in stride and think of this list as something lighthearted by a member of the community, for the community. Now go out there and find your readers! — Marc Fischer / Public Collectors

Excerpt (the whole left page): Possible Reasons Why People Aren't Buying Your Books and Zines at the Art Book Fair / Zine Fest They are also publishers and have little money for other people’s books and zines. You left your table to go look at other publishers’ stuff or buy lunch because you didn’t pack enough snacks. You are looking at your phone too much. Or, you are busy reading someone else’s book and need to look up from it. You aren’t talking to them and are passively waiting for someone to understand your work, care, and buy it with no effort on your part. There are too many other people with tables at the fair/fest and not enough attendees to justify having so many participants. The economy sucks and no one has money, but they attended anyway because they love books, zines, and people who make them. Your prices are too high, and the books/zines feel like they are a poor value compared to other publications with similar qualities and production values. You made something that is a weird format or too large and no one wants to carry it around. They want to pay for your books and zines with some version of money that you don’t accept because every publisher is now expected to take about five different forms of payment. They came to the event to be seen and you are just scenery. There is a DJ, you are close to the speakers, and the music is too loud to have a conversation about your work. The vibes are bad. The light is bad, The breath/B.O. is bad. They are holding four cups of coffee, a glass of wine, and three tote bags filled with books. They are too burdened with stuff to handle or buy any more things. They only came to trade their books and zines with other publishers. Selling isn’t everything, you capitalist jerk!

The last page of the main text: They’re a librarian and blew their budget too early in the fair. They are nervous about buying your last copy. Your work is great but your tone or content don’t fit the fair. They already have 93 different zines about the same subject that your publications are about. You have failed to offer a different take on whatever your thing is. Your type is small and hard to read. Your materials are fragile and will get destroyed in transit. You made the cover of your zine as graphic as possible, and no one wants to be seen carrying around a publication with a giant penis, dead body, or photo of Ted Cruz on the front. Apparently they came to the book fair/zine fest to buy plants, ceramics, stuffed animals, toys, chocolate, jewelry, clothes, and 3-D printed tchotchkes, not books and zines. They are distracted by the dazzling pattern on the tablecloth that you have placed under your books and zines. They are afraid of knocking your books and zines off the elaborate display structures and scaffolding that you are using to display 175 titles on a 3 foot wide table surface. You are still in the process of assembling your books and zines at your table and they don’t want to get in the way of your stapler, bone folder, cutting board and collating station. The super desirable thing you made ten years ago is out of print and your new stuff just isn’t hitting like the thing you are tired of and don’t want to reprint for the rest of your life even though it was profitable. Public Collectors www.publiccollectors.org Publication #110, December, 2025

I had a lot of fun writing this new single-sheet Public Collectors zine: "Why Aren't People Buying Your Books and Zines at Fairs?" Reprinted in full here. It's free if you ask for it when you order from halfletterpress.com or you can get it in this set I made: halfletterpress.com/3-single-she...

Adding to the fun, these issues were purchased from SF-based zine shop, GetZNZ, owned by Matt Wobensmith, founder of the queercore zine/label, Outpunk. Thanks, Matt! getznz.com

As far as we can tell, Creep wasn't reviewed in Factsheet Five (we'll keep looking, but reach out if you know otherwise).

According to Michael Stewart Foley, who drew from Creep's archives in writing the 33 1/3 Book on Dead Kennedy's Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Mickey was a longtime roommate of Jello Biafra and Creep was important in documenting the politics of SF punk in the late 70s.

These specific issues (Issues 56, 63, & 64) belonged to "D Mickey Sampson" AKA "Mickey Creep," "Mick McCarthy," & "Dean Sampson" who put out the SF-punk zine, Creep Fanzine.

More mail arrived this afternoon, as we continue to fill our gaps in the corpus. One of the cool things about ordering these secondhand issues from places like eBay, is that the covers still have their address stickers attached.

Oh wow — good connection!

This newfound extra space made room for more feature stories, this hilarious & incisive round up of the mainstream media's coverage of zines written by Chip Rowe (who now edits @highlandscurrent.bsky.social). Rowe's comment on the 1993 story from Details we posted about recently? Fuck Details. 🤣

To make even more room, the editors also created appendices, called "Other Zines," within more saturated sections, like Politics, Music, and Comix, which would list zines in brief that were previously reviewed.

Reviews from now would be selective & mean that the editors "truly liked your zine and want to recommend it everyone that reads Factsheet Five."

But that would change starting with this issue: "This huge 136-page issue features reviews of about 1,400 publication -- unfortunately about 100 others didn't make the cut."

As #zines continued to become part of the mainstreaming of 90s alternative culture, editor R Seth Friedman need to find ways to manage the deluge. He began his editorial in this issue noting how the tradition of F5 was that any zine sent to it would be reviewed.

Mail day: we received Issue 53 (October 1994), which was missing from our #archives.

Attention @f5archive.bsky.social - the HOMOCORE anthology now exists.

mastodon.social/@tomjennings...

That digital archive is growing by the day. archive.org/search?query...

I know a zine you could use 😀

How exciting! I’ve taught a broader publishing histories unit in my Self-publishing class that makes use of WikiEdu’s curriculum. I love this bc students are making public contributions with their research. Happy to share more if you’d like. Also suggest Bein’s “A Publishing Assemblage” for methods.

Back cover of Issue 14 (May 1985). Circulation: 600 archive.org/details/14_2... #zines #discordian #posterart #factsheetfive #fandom #StrangerThings #Benguiat

Did you know several issues of Factsheet Five are available over at the @archive.org? The corpus isn't complete & the process of cleaning and OCR'ing images can be slow/painful, but the hope is that this allows more folks to read & research 80s-90s zine culture. archive.org/search?query...

@jerod23.bsky.social making an appearance here!

"It was 1985," recalls Tower's Doug Biggert. "I was in Bulldog News in Seattle. I read it cover to cover. Marked it up and sent out thirty-five or forty letters for zines. It's the bible. Factsheet Five is the bible." from "Soapbox Samurai" from the Aug 1993 issue of Details.

Yeah ... and I guess what's interesting about the story is that no matter if you were an anarchist or entrepreneur, no editor could make F5 sustainable.

I'm aware of the problems people have with Microcosm and with other folks in the zine community, including the person I mentioned in the post. Like it or not, these folks are involved. Discussion/citation does not equal endorsement.

That's fair. I'm not as interested in that conversation as I am in pointing out how much he relied on Factsheet Five under Gunderloy's anarchism to explicate zine history and the politics of zines at that time.

That said, while he does dedicate a significant portion of Chapter 7 ("Purity and Danger") to F5 (subtitling it "FACTSHEET FIVE VERSUS FACTSHEET FIVE") most of the mentions of F5 show up in the endnotes and the methodology is never really laid out in the main body of the. text.

Thank you, Jolie! That's a good question. I don't know if it disappeared from the narrative as much as his book and F5 got acknowledged by subsequent scholars before they moved on to whatever research they were interested in (the uptick in citations after 2012 is really interesting to me.