Talking to a zine veteran at a show made me rethink my whole approach to binding

Had a chat with this older guy named Pete at a zine fest in Portland last month. He looked at my stapled saddle-stitch stuff and said "youre just making a pamphlet, not a zine" and it kind of stung. But then he showed me how he does a simple single-stitch binding with thread and a needle. Took like 15 minutes but the thing lays flat and feels solid. Been doing it ever since. Anyone else get a wake up call from an old head?

2 comments

2 Comments

angela_knight28d ago

Pete at the Portland show actually fixed my whole binding game too, and I gotta say I think jakerivera is missing the point. I spent like 3 years cranking out stapled booklets that fell apart in backpacks and looked like homework assignments. The first time I did a single stitch binding on a 32 page zine about punk show etiquette, I sold 40 copies in one night and nobody complained about the pages coming loose. A pamphlet is fine if you're handing out a 4 page flyer for your band's show next week, but if you're trying to make something that feels like a real object someone wants to keep, the extra 15 minutes with a needle is totally worth it. My hands are shaky and I still mess up the thread tension sometimes but the finished product just hits different.

jakerivera28d ago

Different door for different folks. A good pamphlet has its own place, straight up. Sometimes you just need something cheap and fast to get the words out, that old school binding is cool but not everyone's got the time or the hands for it.