Perth Zine Collective

This being my first experience both wandering in the city of Melbourne and participating in a small press fair, I will say naïve things. Like how I imagined there to be strings playing when we arrived in Melbourne, specifically the fancy song you hear when Homer Simpson visits the land of chocolate.

Here is a picture of the zines and typewriters in Sticky. What tasty treats!

I was pretty humbled to have been invited to Page Parlour, which was part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival. It was held in the Atrium, which resembles a large beehive made from metal and glass. We had heard from a few past participants that cold winds can race through the Atrium entrance and blow zines right off your table. But on Sunday 5 June the weather was bright and still, the wind was negligible, and we settled in for a fairly halcyon day.

The best thing about Page Parlour was meeting the other publishers, editors and zinesters. We shared our table with Greta from Freerange Press. The table across from us had Johannes Jakob, editor of Voiceworks, and Susie, who was selling some pretty sweet zines like Just My Typewriter and Four Crushes. At the Atrium entrance there was the Emerging Writers’ Festival publication The Reader, a zine called Chase Hot Air Balloons, and another called There, a moment held. At the other end of the Atrium was Tim Train, who makes the consistently funny and charming zine Badger’s Dozen, as well as many other talent-packed items of joy, like the anthology of a Sydney literary night called Penguin Plays Rough. All the small press people and zinesters were pretty darn friendly. The editors from page seventeen and [untitled] even came up to our stall just to say hello. I don’t know if I could have handled a larger zine fair – the level of awesomeness I experienced on the day took its mighty toll on my wallet. I stuffed my backpack full of other people’s zines.

There was a lot of traffic in the Atrium, but most of the people passing through were tourists, families, and visitors of the National Art Gallery. A lot of the people that came to look at our table weren’t aware that the event was called ‘Page Parlour’, but they were all friendly and interested in zines. Although there was a stream of casual browsers all day long, in the end it was really surprising when we counted our stock and realised that we had sold more zines on this day than any other day ever.

When 5pm came and people began packing up and the sun slouched down to peek through the Atrium entrance, I was chilling with a blue milkshake. It was a pretty good time.

Love from

Sj Finch
The Perth zine Collective