The DIY information technology helping us build a better world

In an era of book bans, people are still finding ways to read, write, and share freely. One result we’ve noticed: a groundswell of zines. That’s why we’re calling 2025 the Year of Zines.

What’s a zine? It’s a stapled, photocopied love letter to a passionate interest. People write zines about whatever they need to: to tell their story uncensored, to express themselves fearlessly in words and art, to share knowledge or resources, to celebrate something they care about deeply, to connect directly with readers. Zines can take many forms, from a handwritten manifesto distributed out of a fanny pack to a polished product sold in stores. 

We have published and sold zines since 1996, and we’ve seen many waves of interest come and go. But we haven’t seen anything like the surge of zine sales that began on November 9, 2024. Sure, there was a two-week run on reproductive rights resources, books like How to Get Your Period and zines like Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom pushing aside all other holiday bestsellers (even Slingshot Planners!) on their way to the top of the charts. But that urgency quickly died down, revealing an even stickier trend on our orders page—people were, and still are, loading up with assorted, seemingly random zines, on every topic, from every era. Zines about bees, government misdeeds, backyard building projects, mental health, abortion, abortion, abortion. Zines and books about how to make zines.

What’s behind this hunger for zines? To us, it’s not that hard to see. We are all desperate to expand our understanding, to think freely, to feel safe connections with others and with our own thoughts, to learn the skills we need to survive this era. Online media, especially social media, is compromised. Books can be slow to come out, ponderous to read, relentlessly gatekept, banned up the wazoo. Zines are none of these. They’re a fix that satisfies the urgent need for pithy commentary, bigger perspective, getting a look inside someone else’s head without needing to have your own perfectly-formed and fully-informed opinion. They provide a small, safe bubble with no mandate for response. A zine is a safe place to not know, to be wrong, to change your mind, and to entertain other perspectives.

Zines can be banned, but they’re too slippery to be stopped, too slight to be taken seriously, some too underground to even be found. They are decentralized, passed hand-to-hand, and there are no gatekeepers to corrupt or bottlenecks to plug. 

And the best thing about zines is that you can create one! You can publish it yourself, all you need is something to say and access to a printer or copier. You can give copies to your friends, leave them in the public library or at Little Free Libraries, mail them to the creators who made you fall in love with zines in the first place. This is far from the expensive corporate allure of self-publishing a book-shaped object to remain forever hidden in the algorithm. Zines are a form of energy that can’t be contained by anyone, even us, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

So we’re calling 2025 the Year of Zines, and this is what it means: read zines. Seek them out. We have a ton in our catalog, and we sell them to more and more stores. You can find a plethora of printed zines on Etsy and digital ones on itch.io. More and more cities and towns are hosting their own zine fests. You’ll find them hiding out in craft fair booths, in a bin at the library. Search for zines + your area of passionate interest. Once you start looking, you’ll see them everywhere. (And if you have a store, check out our zine about selling zines!). 

And when you aren’t finding the exact zine you want, well, you know what to do. How do you think we got started making them? 

If you’d like to submit a zine or an idea for one to Microcosm, you can read a little more about our guidelines and process here. Happy creating!