Collecting the Wretched Refuse: Lifting a Lamp to Zines, Military Newspapers, and Wisconsinalia

Abstract

Newspapers/periodicals librarian James Danky does collection building wherever he goes and with whomever he communicates, it seems. Thanks to his efforts, the Madison-based Wisconsin Historical Society collects materials from categories other librarians usually overlook, including zines (homemade periodicals, produced for reasons other than to make money, usually photocopied and published irregularly), something he compares to "other print forms that served the same purposes"—radical handbills of the 1880s, poetry pamphlets of the 1950s, and underground newspapers of the 1960s. Danky also collects Wisconsin-based periodicals, no matter how small their circulation, nor how esoteric their content, from Cheese Reporter to Clothed with the Sun; prison publications; and military, embassy, and consulate publications. WHS is the only institution in the United States collecting military base publications, a genre full of racy-sounding titles like Shoot 'Em Down and Danger Forward. These magazines and papers provide unique, close-up views of soldiers' lives, or at least a glimpse at the culture in which they work.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.