“Nothing is sold here”immediately announces a small sign hanging high on the blue shelves of the Fanzinarium, a small shop located in the heart of 20my Parisian district. But “everything is to be read”, He immediately promises another. ” All “, more than 6,000 fanzines, from the 60s to the present. Those curious can come and consult these amateur magazines every Wednesday afternoon and Sunday afternoon during office hours. Converted into a privileged place to share about fanzinat, this associative and voluntary library celebrates its fifth anniversary, on Saturday, October 19, with a room at Café La Pêche in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis).
Behind the walls of this old shoe rack, which we can still guess thanks to the wallpaper decorated with red shoes, we sit in a corner of a table or on a stepladder, depending on the crowd, to read these amateur publications. According to Maël Rannou, librarian, author of several academic articles on fanzinat in France and himself a “fanzinat” since he was 14, the phenomenon is as difficult to quantify as it is to define. One constant, however: “The distribution of fanzines is carried out outside the traditional circuits” of the networks of kiosks or bookstores, he specifies. There are no restrictions except on the content, form or frequency of publication.
The abundance, from floor to ceiling, attests to the diversity of themes addressed by popular engravings, from anarchist We are hungry! to Angèle Douche’s latest unconventional poetry via Ikki, which parodies the manga. Whether they talk about punk, cinema, Japanese pop, veganism, sexuality… fanzines are born from a lack, from a certain absence in traditional media, but also from the marginalization of centers of interest, the image of the first “zines” in science fiction born in the 1930s in the United States. In France, fanzinat developed considerably after the war, especially since the arrival of photocopiers.
A handful of fanzinotheques in France
In the Fanzinarium, an entire section of French countercultures and the spirit of fan communities, born before or with the Internet, waits to be discovered and rediscovered. Did you happen to have this booklet that we saw one day in the early 2000s at a festival, in which manga fans parodied political figures as Japanese characters? The evocation comes to the home of Delphine Ya-Chee-Chan, a founding member who welcomes us this autumn Sunday, who will eventually find it in her archives.
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