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| Papercut Zine Library : Email Interview with Mothra, Zinester behind Papercut Zine Library : March 28, 2006 |
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1. What drove you to be a part of this, and what keeps you going? I started this project in 2004 when it was 600 zines on my floor. Boston had a lot of zines and no place to put them all. The community that has sprung up around the library makes all the work worthwhile. 2. How long has the zine library been open? The library's been open since May 2005. 3. Setting up the library itself, was it difficult to find a location/how did you find the location? The location kinda fell into our laps. A friend of ours who was running a space at the time offered a room to us. He no longer runs the space, but there we remain. It's a pretty sweet space. 4. As a collective, has the core group changed much over time? The core group has grown and gotten a bit more diversified, but other than that, it has stayed relatively the same. 5. Tell me about the space for zinesters to work while they're there. What is the set up? right now, we don't have a set space for people to work. You can kinda just work anywhere. It's a large building and if there's not meetings going on, its cool to do any sort of work there. We have a long armed stapler, a big box of scraps an magazines and we're right down the street from Staples/Kinkos/etc. 6. Do you have planned workshops and discussions or does it just happen? Right now we're working to put together a zine making workshop for a public library program. We've been talking with librarians from the Belmont Public Library about doing a summer zine making workshop for young adults. 7. What are the biggest challenges to running this library? the biggest challenges to running the library has been keeping steady hours and getting people to return their zines. We've had some space issues, but those get cleared up pretty easily. Right now, we've got some zines that have been out since last summer and its a pretty big bummer, and its good that late zines are our biggest annoyance right now. 8. What are some of your goals/plans for the future of the library? We've discussed going non-profit, but for now we like not having to deal with taxes and paperwork. We're just hoping to get more friendly with the big public libraries in the area, put on more independent media workshops and help keep the library a comfortable and inspiring place to hang out at. |