Fanfiction Enthusiasts Are Digitally Preserving Decades Worth of Zines

An entire generation of fandom was at risk of being lost—until now. After years of cold calling, scanning and converting file formats, pre-internet era fanzines are now rapidly being digitized and finding homes in online repositories and archival collections. 

The Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, an initiative nearly a decade in the making, seeks to make fan stories and art from physical fanzines accessible to new and seasoned generations of fandoms alike. 

Fanzines are small, self-published books created by enthusiasts of a popular media franchise. The zines are unlicensed, and can contain fanfiction, original art, and—perhaps most famously—porn and erotica. Before the internet gave us websites like fanfiction.net, fanzines—and their Japanese equivalent, doujinshi—were sold by mail order or traded at in-person meetups, allowing fandoms to swap original content based on their favorite characters and stories.

Morgan Dawn, a fandom historian based in Silicon Valley, first started to see fans reporting other fans to eBay for copyright infringement for reselling used vintage fanzines. Dawn didn’t understand why fans were policing each other given that before the internet, fanzines often circulated from person to person via snail mail. 

The experience led to an epiphany: That these physical fanzines needed to be preserved for future generations of fans and researchers to access. 

“We were wives, we were moms, we were daughters in the 60s and 70s, when that was mainly our role,” Dawn told Motherboard. “And here we went off and did all this—we copy-edited, we printed, we wrote, we drew art, we created conventions, we single-handedly created a whole arm of fandom that hadn’t existed before, that wasn’t simply consumer based.” 

Dawn reached out to one seller in particular and asked for copies of the seller's covers that they’d previously scanned. Between 2011 and 2013, she and several other fans started volunteering their time to find and digitize other copies of fanzines. In 2012, Dawn scanned a “slash” fanzine—a genre of fanzines that focuses on same-sex relationships between characters—called Angel in the Dark that was based on the crime drama The Professionals for a friend and uploaded it to Archive of Our Own (AO3) in hopes that someone would be able to work on it. 

“When you scan a fanzine and it's in PDF format, it is an image file, if you try to convert it to a text file, you have to do laborious copy editing,” she explained. “[The author] was in her 60s, she couldn't do it. I couldn't do it—I didn't have time. So what I did is I put it up, I created a little page for it on AO3 under her name, with her permission, of course.” She put a link on that page to a Dropbox file containing the fanzine, but after a few years, it was reported and removed: In 2017, AO3’s Terms and Conditions didn’t permit users to post fan works that consist only of a simple link directing readers to another website, so the Dropbox link and page was taken down. At this point, Dawn says she was frustrated with hosting site constraints, so she officially launched the Zinedom project. With help from 30 volunteers, Dawn began converting, editing, and uploading some of the zines they had collected over the years. 

This year, Open Doors, a segment of the Organization for Transformative Works dedicated to saving “those fannish projects that might otherwise be lost due to lack of time, interest, or resources on the part of the current maintainer,” according to its website, offered to formally adopt the Zinedom project, and renamed the new collaboration the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project. Now the group is making its way through the backlog of thousands of scans accumulated by Zinedom over the years. 

Now, Dawn says, public access is only a matter of finding the publishers or writers to get the permission to release the content. 

“I actually went through the Fanlore wiki to find the publishers who are the most prolific and then tried to track them down,” she said. “We have to use Facebook. We have to use online people tracking websites. And then sometimes obituaries. You have to pick up the phone and call a lot of wrong numbers.” 

But when she does get a hold of the family or friends of the publishers, the conversations are priceless. She recalls connecting with one man who was particularly difficult to find whose wife—who had published fanzines—had recently passed away.

“It was a really emotional conversation to have,” she said. “And I thought it was really wonderful because, you know, he was talking about him participating in her publishing the fanzines, editing the fanzines, how involved he was … and that’s how we would get the permissions.”

Open Doors is now preparing to upload the zines from Zinedom’s backlog to its online archive, taking the zines Dawn acquired permissions for and feeding them through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which attempts to convert pictures of book pages to digital text. According to Open Doors’ chairperson Eskici, who goes by her online pseudonym, this part can be a challenge.

“It can be very time consuming to copy, edit, and proofread” each zine, Eskici told Motherboard. “If [OCR] didn't pick up all the letters correctly, you know, sometimes it's like, you end up completely retyping parts of it if the OCR didn't do a good job. Sometimes you get lucky.” 

Then Eskici has to think about how to organize the collections and sub-collections for each of the issues. Both Open Doors and Zinedom have collaborated with university libraries to make some zine scans accessible to scholars, including Texas A&M University Libraries’ Sandy Herald Memorial Digitized Media Fanzine Collection. Jeremy Brett, the collection’s curator, says that as a public institution the collection is available to anyone willing to make a trip to the university’s central library, because of that fair use clause under U.S. copyright law.

“We find a lot of fans are grateful to see their stuff in a place where it’ll be carefully preserved,” Brett told Motherboard. “I think they're excited to have it saved now. The flip side of that, of course, is a lot of this stuff was not meant to be shown, to be kept forever, right?”

Earlier generations were more likely to write fanfiction and create fanzines under aliases for a specific, tight-knit community. In many cases these works were never intended for a wider audience. Brett says that it’s important for him to make it clear that the library respects people’s copyrights and their privacy. 

“It gives them a space where they can be heard, where they can express themselves, where they can feel safe, and build communities amongst like-minded people,” he said. “So I mean, that's a phenomenon that’s really important. I think that's part of the human experience.”

Copies of the works are also being added to the Internet Archive’s Fanfiction Fanzine Collection. Eskici says Open Doors is also working on creating an archive that’s exclusively accessible to researchers in the future. 

“Even for works where we don't have permission to upload them to the public, having a database that researchers can get into and access things even without permission that way, is a project that we have in the works for the future,” she said. 

Dawn hopes that through the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, researchers and generations of fans will be able to find relief from solitude, she said. “We're not alone, we have never been illegal, and we never will be.”