Silent Sports reviewed as ‘notazine’
Not since high school, when I self published a little pamphlet of my own teenage angsty prose and less than skillful drawings, have I as eagerly anticipated a reviewer’s take on my work. Back then my photocopied “perzines” (personal amateur publications) were read by no one but my parents, small circle of friends and whoever else I could get to shell out 50 cents for a copy. It wasn’t until I discovered the infamous but long-since defunct zine-about-zines Factsheet 5 and submitted an issue or two to its scrutiny did I start getting mailorders from all over the country. That was my heady introduction to “getting published.”
Silent Sports already had a loyal, if modest, readership well before I took the helm nearly five years ago. Nevertheless, about a year ago when I happened upon Zine World – another compendium of capsule-length write-ups of hundreds of small and independent print publications – I didn’t hesitate to send them an issue.
Well, Zine World No. 26 (with its pages held together with staples AND blue masking tape) just came out and it includes a review of the June 2007 issue of Silent Sports I sent them. The review falls under the heading “notazine,” although I would argue every issue of Silent Sports largely meets Zine World’s definition of a zine:
“Zines are publications done for the love of doing them, not to make a profit or a living. Most zines are photocopied. Some are printed offset like a magazine but with a print run of hundreds or possibly thousands instead of hundreds of thousands or more. In a zine, you might find typos, misspelled words, improper grammar and brilliant or radical or just plain honest ideas that simply arten’t allowed in Time, Newsweek or People magazines.”
That’s Silent Sports! The mag is more of a labor of love than profitable. We print several thousand copies a month with more typos than I’d care to admit. But most importantly, we’re brilliant, radical (to the couch potato majority, anyway) AND honest.
Anyway, here’s the review, written by Zine World’s voluntary reviewer “Stephanie K.” of that 16-month-old issue of Silent Sports:
“I picked this up prepared to be bored silly while reading it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find some interesting articles and a glimpse of a world I know very little about: the world of nonmotorized sports. It focuses on inline skating, mountain biking, canoeing, etc. and has a pronounced conservationist slant. I really enjoyed the article about volksmarching, which is noncompetitive, purposeful walking. A third of the magazine is taken up by a calendar of events, mainly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Iowa. Thick newsstand-magazine size with color covers and some color pictures and ads inside.”
While I could quibble with the omission of running and cross-country skiing or Illinois and Ontario from that summary, it’s pretty dead-on. I just find it interesting to see how the mag is perceived by someone not already inclined toward its subject matter. In this case, Silent Sports held up rather well under the gaze of an outsider.
Whether the review will garner new subscriptions from folks primarily looking to Zine World for new punk rock and anarchist titles remains to be seen. But I wasn’t after a bump in circulation. I was just on a nostalgia trip. Even in this Internet age, it’s great to see forums like Zine World still exist to introduce small print publications to a wider readership.
– Joel Patenaude