In the Nineties Kinkos was actually a cool place to hang out– like, every slightly punk rock girl in Minneapolis had a crush on someone who worked at Kinkos. They were open twenty-four hours and we’d go in late at night, make our fliers or whatever, maybe if they really liked us, they’d give us a good deal on color copies (which were a big deal back then).  Anyway, I never made a zine, but I think it’s fair to say that my aesthetic was zine-like, as illustrated by the image on the left, my high school senior page.  You print the photo as high contrast as possible.  Then you photocopy it, glue some words on it (here, torn from Alice in Wonderland) and photocopy it again and again.

Anyway, a few years after that high school yearbook page, I’d dropped out of college and had moved to Minneapolis and opened a 24 hour collective coffee shop.  By then the Zine thing was in such full swing it was almost not cool anymore.  Almost. But there was this guy named Aaron Cometbus who would hop trains and write zines about the places he went.  When he wrote a zine about our coffee shop (called, in real life The Hard Times Cafe, but in the zine, called The Dead End,) we really felt we’d arrived.

Unlike many of his zines, this one has almost no images, only this picture on the front.  And every page is handwritten except for the title, which is pretty interesting, because obviously he had access to computers, and also because the handwriting (there are at least 80 pages) is so perfect, so time consuming.

He must’ve had to write it out a bunch of times.  Plus, this was published in 2000.  The days of hanging out late at nights at Kinko’s were pretty much over.  This was near the end of Cometbus’ reign, I think, almost a nostalgia zine.

Still, the handwriting makes it precious.  I’ve brought it everywhere with me for the last fourteen years.  That drawing on the cover is pretty accurate, by the way.