Glasgow Women's Library

By Lea Cooper, University of Kent

From August 2022 - January 2023, I was doing a placement at Glasgow Women’s Library. It was very different to my experience in Athens where I did a placement at Athens Zine Bibliotheque. For one, I didn’t get Covid. It was much colder and wetter in Glasgow in winter. Athens is a DIY collection connected to an arts space, where GWL is a more formal archive and part of a much bigger collection. And whilst in Athens I was quite public-facing, at GWL I spent much of my time with my noise-cancelling headphones on, on the mezzanine, reading zines.

I learnt a lot - including the optimum configuration of clothes for walking in the rain from Queen Street to GWL. I’ve never really worked with older zines before - Edinburgh Zine Library (which I help run), Wellcome Collection (which my PhD focuses on) and the Athens Zine Bibliotheque have mostly contemporary zines. It brought up a whole different set of questions and feelings, and made me try out some different things.

On my first day at GWL, as I was just finding my feet, I was inspired by the zine review zines and zine catalogues from the 1990s that I came across and decided I would experiment with making my own. Making the first review zine, it felt like this was an interesting way to create a richer (if idiosyncratic) set of information about the zines in the collection, that users could potentially search through. So as I wrote my little reviews, I also added tags to each of the zines. These tags evolved as I got deeper into the collection and it became apparent that certain features of zines - for example, where they were made - were particularly important in this collection. Although there were 12 boxes, within the time limits of my placement I focused on the first 6 - I hope this unfinishedness feels like an invitation to continue this work! Once the review zines had been written, I collated the tags to produce an index. I then used this index to trace my own ‘constellations’ within the collection.

Through these constellations I wanted to do more than just think about zines as primary source materials for researching particular topics. Once I’d assembled together the constellations zine, index and the various box review zines I felt like there was something missing. So I ended up my placement writing a zine guide to ‘Making Use of the Zine at Glasgow Women’s Library’ (in this idea of “Use” I’m really drawing from reading Sara Ahmed’s excellent book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use). I wanted to offer some prompt questions for people coming to the zine collection to read zines (maybe for the first time), to get inspiration for making zines, or to research zines or topics that the zines in the collection cover. I spent a while considering how to hold all these smaller zines together, and then the idea of a key ring came to me, and this suited my insatiable desire for wordplay. The title ‘Ring of Zines’ references the ring of keys from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which seemed fitting for a set of zines about GWL.

You can read ‘Ring of Zines: Making Use of the Zines at Glasgow Women’s Library’ by downloading it from: https://zinejam.com/blog-1/glasgow-womens-library-a-ring-of-zines