A proto-Zine from 1876!

The Crucible. ed. Clarence Allen. Vol. I, No. 3 (March 15, 1876). Washington, D.C. Soft-cover 32-mo, 8 pp.

 

The first true Zine network – non-commercial pamphlets printed by (often adolescent) amateurs in tiny editions on personal reproduction devices at home to be traded, rather than sold, through a network that spanned both local and postal communities – was known as the Amateur Press movement. (The term came nearly a century later) It began forming during the 1860s in America, and in 1876 the National Amateur Press Association was founded; self-declared non-professionals traded their home-printed pamphlets through massive mailing lists, like the later mail art and zine networks. Clarance Allen founded one of the most influential of these early zines, The Crucible, that very year, and even before the official Association – and nearly a century before the more confrontational zine culture of Riot Grrl and Punk – an extensive community of underground micropublishing was flourishing; The Crucible was one of at least 30 amateur periodicals being published in Washington D.C. at the time. The back cover includes paid adverts for ink and moveable type marketed specifically for micro-publishers working on home machines and small offices, showing just how substantial the subculture had already become.