A History on my Living Room Floor

A few weeks back I finally collected the many boxes of books and comics I’d put in storage last April. The books and graphic novels (comics with spines) were unpacked fairly quickly as they could be piled up against the wall until such time as I bought some shelves. The comics-without-spines have their own specialist geek boxes and there’s only two of them these days so they weren’t a problem. The six huge boxes of small press comics and zines however were another issue altogether.

You have to bear in mind that for a few years in the mid-to-late 90s I was a “key figure” on the UK small press comics scene, first producing the regular reviews flyer, TRS, and then running the big mail order distro, BugPowder. (TRS is now TRS2 run by Jez, while BugPowder is, well, it’s BugPowder.) So not only have I spent the last 15 years buying small press comics I’ve also been sent hundreds of the things for review or on spec for sale from all over the world. Six boxes might not seem that many but consider that most of them are 24-48 pages long in A5 format. If they were novels they’d fill a house easily. And each one is unique, usually with a print run of under 100, created by enough people to fill a town. I think. Because I’ve never actually sat down at catalogued them.

And so now that I’ve taken something of back seat, like an old man sitting in his smoking jacket smiling benevolently at the younger generation as they go about being all enthusiastic and offering advice to any bemused ear that will take it (while occasionally coming up with crazy notions of getting back on the wagon but never quite getting around to it), I look at this huge collection and I think, what shall I do with it? Last March I announced it has been donated to the community at large, and I still stand by that, but before anything can happen it needs to be quantified. And even now, there being so much stuff it’s useless without being sorted into some kind of order, but figuring out what order to put it in when these things don’t always give themselves well to “title/artist” categorising, as well as the size of the job, the sorting let alone any actual cataloging.

Every time I’d open a box and started digging in I’d get scared by the enormity of it all. So I’d sealed it up and put it away.

Next weekend I’m chairing a panel at Caption on the History of the Small Press and as part of that I want to have a range of distro catalogues and review zines on hand so people can see what came before. Of course this stuff is all mixed up with the actual comics themselves along with a range of non-comics zines and other strange items of xerography. So I didn’t have an excuse any more. The boxes had to be opened.

The living room floor is now covered in small press comics. Sam is away on her annual pilgrimage to the States and won’t be back for a fortnight so the mess can remain until then. So far I’ve separated the non-comics zines into their own (surprisingly small) pile, removed any comics-related zines into their own (surprisingly large) pile while the rest is sorted by size, which is how it’s always been sorted. A4, US-comic-size, A5 and minis. Oh, and a small pile of random ephemera, letters, postcards, interesting envelopes, flyers, that kind of stuff. That was the easy part. The question is, what the fuck do I do next?

(Catalogue, catalogue, catalogue, I know. I’m just procrastinating now the easy bit has been done…)

(And I haven’t even started on the four boxes of leftover stock from the BugPowder distro days…)