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Railroad Semantics #6
by Aaron Dactyl
Man, could Railroad Semantics get any better? Each issue Aaron Dactyl takes his zine up a notch. This issue of Aaron's train-bound adventure zine is chock full of history, maps, beautiful photos, and articles from ...
104 pages, b&w, 1/2 size
$6.00
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Out Now
Barefoot & In the Kitchen: Vegan Recipes For You
OUT NOW! This heavily illustrated vegan cookbook is packed with delicious recipes and entertaining essays. Not at all an exclusive affair, Barefoot and in the Kitchen works with ingredients available to folks everywhere—not just those with access to fancy health food stores. Make a basic white sauce, your own seitan, mac'n'cheese, cornbread, and cookies. Folks who have been vegan for awhile will love variations like stuffed shells, dirty rice, and "Cinnamon Buns of Doom." For Ashley resistance is tasty and once you try out these recipes your resistance will taste good too!
Wild Fermentation
BACK IN PRINT! A very literal guide, "A DIY Guide to Cultural Manipulation" is a great resource for learning to use the microbes around you. Wanna learn how to make your own sourdough? Miso? Injera (Ethiopian sourdough) bread?!!! It's in this handy dandy and super resourceful guide for fermenting in the comfort of your own home. Yummy home made sour cream! Buttermilk! Cheese and tempeh!!! Double and triple wow your friends and family with the helpful directions on how to ferment your own kimchi and other tasty, briny treats.
White Elephants
OUT NOW! White elephants are the odd, old, and discarded things that end up at yard sales and flea markets—and Katie Haegele loves them all. Well, an awful lot of them, anyway. She lives a few blocks from the house she grew up in, and every summer she and her mother scour the neighborhood tag sales, looking for treasure. In this unusual, touching memoir, she chronicles the places they go and the things they find there, describing every detail in her singular, charming voice. In the end she finds more than just ugly table lamps and frilly aprons, ultimately discovering a real friendship with her mother, a deeper connection to her father, whose death left a hole in her life—and even a bit of romance.
DIY Screenprinting
BACK IN PRINT! A fascinating graphic novel that details the art and science of screenprinting from inception to printed t-shirts to working in a print shop to understanding line screens, to hawking your printed wares on the street! How to build a screen, burn an image, test how things are going, pull ink, wash out screens, know what screen mesh to use, and creative ideas. It's a true joy to see the exaggerated illustrations while learning such a useful and practical craft! How to turn your home into a t-shirt factory! Essential for people who don't know how to screenprint or those a bit rusty.
Hurt
OUT NOW! HURT is Portland activist Kristian Williams' collection of articles and interviews on the history, psychology, and current state of torture in democratic societies. Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue and American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, has pulled together a vast and comprehensive resource on this abominable act. Articles include David Cunningham's “Prisons, Torture, and Imperialism,” a piece on the anarchist perspective taken from comments at the 2008 Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco, and a great essay on writing about torture, among many others. This sober 64-page document is a heavy piece of work—dark, informative, and oft times harrowing. But it's also about working hard to intact change. As says Williams in the Gyozo Nehez interview, “At the outset, I think it's more important to have a sense of hope, that things can be different and through our actions we can contribute to that change. The joy comes later, from struggle itself as much as from victory.” HURT is a how-to manual on fighting and understanding torture—a piece of the struggle itself.
Catalogs & Bookmarks for 2012!
Our 2012 Catalog & Bookmark! Zines, books, stickers, buttons, patches, t-shirts, posters, postcards, talkies, etc from the website featured on stapled pieces of paper! Stop spending all day on the internet! Get a paper copy! If you want to help, we would love to give you a stack to hand out around town or leave in record stores, coffee shops, bookstores, libraries, and the like. (We will include our undying love and gratitude with the catalogs we send you, of course!) Just include your address and how many you can pass out.
Homesweet Homegrown
OUT NOW! Robyn Jasko and Jennifer Biggs' Homesweet Homegrown is self-described as “a simple DIY guide to growing, storing, and making your own food, no matter where you live.” An ideal companion to Raleigh Briggs' DIY guide Make Your Place, Jasko and Biggs' debut book will turn you into a healthy, happy farmer even if you live in a big city sky-rise. Based around eight comprehensive sections (Know, Start, Grow, Plant, Plan, Make, Eat, and Store), this wonderful 128-page guide takes you through all the steps of crop nurturing, and gives the goods for everyone from the base beginner to the well-seasoned farmhand. (The recipe section alone is enough to keep you comin' back to this gem for years to come!) Narrated in a friendly, helpful tone by Jasko and held aloft by Biggs' great illustrations, this book is the definition of awesomely useful. Super, super, SUPER inspiring. Grow your own!
Xerography Debt #30
Davida Gypsy Breier's review zine, Xerography Debt is a labor of love and obsession. Now on its 30th issue, Xerography Debt, Xerox Debt to fans) is "the review zine with personal tendencies," allowing its hand-picked cast of contributors to essay both the zines they love and where those zines find them in their lives. Issue 30 is 64 pages of zine-love goodness, with contributors like Al Burian, Microcosm founder Joe Biel, Eric Lyden, Fred Argoff, and many more reviewing zines. In an age of blogs and tweets, Xerox Debt is a beautiful, earnest anachronism, a publication that seems to come from a different era, but is firmly entrenched in the now. As says Breier in her review of The Ken Chronicles, "It is a slice of life packaged in zine form." They want to review your zines in future issues: Davida Gypsy Breier / PO Box 11064 / Baltimore, MD 21212 USA
The Crusades
In the new edition of J. Gerlach's Simple History series Crusades zine we look at the period between 1095 and 1229, a time of widespread cruelty, political expansion, and religious hypocrisy. As Gerlach says in the zine's intro, "It is said that religious differences have caused most wars. Certainly this reasoning could be applied to the Crusades—a battle of Christians against Muslims for control of the 'Holy Land.' But as in other 'religious wars,' religion was not the main reason to fight." What comes next is an intelligent, fast-faced look at the hows and whys of this dark (and oft romanticized) spot in our history. Gerlach's illustrated, 48-page take on the Crusades is an accessible but richly detailed piece of cultural documentation. In this day of terrorists and nationalism, oil-wars and martyrs, this text will ring true to modern readers. The big, hot button themes—jihad, imperialism, propaganda, religious fervor—are all the same and the result can be chilling. As says Gerlach, "It goes back and forth, with no end in sight." Scary and synchronistic, this is the most relevant Simple History zine yet.
Rad Dad #21
It's the Rad Dad Occupy issue! In issue #21, Rad Dad editor Tomas Moniz and co. take on the recent global occupations from a radical parent's perspective. Are potentially volatile protests like Occupy Wall Street kid-friendly? Are the folks behind the Occupy events organized enough to keep your children safe should the balance of power tip? Issue #21's contributors tackle the topic from a variety of angles, giving a balanced, clear-eyed spectrum of advice. Also in this issue is a series of non-Occupy writing, including a heartfelt essay on keeping your daughter off the stripper pole, a feature about the Foxfire Book series as a remedy for end-of-empire blues, and much more! Hot on the heals of the Rad Dad book, issue 21 is a sure-fire sign that Tomas and his contributors are not slowing down any time soon. This classic for-radical-parents by-radical-parents publication is essential reading for parents and non-parents alike.
Railroad Semantics #1
Devoted to trainhopping and train culture, Railroad Semantics describes the sights, sounds, successes, and defeats of riding around the U.S. in near-poetic detail. This first issue explores a round-trip, early-spring train ride from Portland to Pocatello and back, as well as a long, winter ride to Eugene. It features a wide array of articles on railroads and rail-related activity, letters, postcards, and is full of absolutely gorgeous photographs of landscapes and hobo graffiti! A poetic sense of adventure captured in words, pictures, and scenic vistas!.
Zinester's Guide to PDX, 5th Ed!
Billed as a "low/no budget guide to visiting and living in Portland, Oregon, the Zinester's Guide to Portland breaks down the PDX grid by neighborhood with descriptions of good restaurants, thrift stores, bars, bridges, places to loiter, etc. (lots of etc.). The newly overhauled and illustrated fifth edition gets shoulder-deep into the history and local lore, providing a well-rounded argument as to why (fill in the blank) deserves your time. It also demystifies the TriMet public transportation system, bike events and culture, outdoorsy stuff, the public libraries—basically anything you need to know as the new kid in town. (Of which there seems to be tons; the Zinester's Guide has been on Powell's Books' top 20 since 2006.) To the wrong eyes the book's title might imply a guide to Portland zine culture, but as editor Shawn Granton says in the introduction, the Zinester's Guide is not just for zinesters, that "It's always been about sharing the interesteng and unique things that make Stumptown great, and also helping people get by that aren't swimming in scads of money." For those of us that can't so much as dogpaddle most days, this is "community" at its mightiest.
is not just for zinesters, that "It's always been about sharing the interesteng and unique things that make Stumptown great, and also helping people get by that aren't swimming in scads of money." For those of us that can't so much as dogpaddle most days, this is "community" at its mightiest.
In The News
Microcosm In Your Town!
The Microcosm cometh! Cookies beware!
BFF Book Subscription
Be our Best Friend Forever (BFF)! Well, not actually forever, but for 6 months you'll receive every new title we publish. The subscription is sliding scale price $10-30/month, and you can either pay in one sum upfront here or pay-as-you-go here. Thanks for your support!
Packs of Miscellany! And Super Savings Abound!
Are you looking for an array of awesomeness, a medley of magnificence? Check out the superpacks and mystery packs on our website! Not only are the savings pretty classy, but it's a sweet way to discover titles without wading through the catalog.
- Themed mystery Fun Packs: Comics, Personal, & Political
- We have around twenty different $20 Superpacks!
- Discontinued shirts are still cheap! Check out shirts here!
Sweatshirts are back!
For the last year, you've been asking "Will you have more of this sweatshirt in medium?" and we kept saying "soon." Well, finally the answer is "now." They won't last long and because they cost a pretty penny to produce, we are debating if we can do 'em again. Get 'em while they are hot.
The Revenge of Print!
Aren't you sick of hearing folks glibly forecasting the death of print? We are. People have been declaring the end of print in some form or other for longer than there's been zines! "Books are over." "Magazines are over." "Comix are over." "Newspapers are over." Bah! We're over things being over. Let's make things happen! So we declared 2011 to be The Revenge Of Print! And the Microcosm staff all made zines lovingly collected in this new $20 Superpack: Revenge of Print! A nice response to publishing doomsayers. "Print is alive if you want it." So the challenge is this: in 2012 Return of the Revenge of Print! Make a zine!
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