Amateur Journalism: The Pagan

The Pagan: A Magazine of Unprofessional Letters, ed. Edward M. Lind & Frederick C. Rassman. No. 1-8, March 1903-June 1905. Custom-bound in hardcover Wide 16-mo, 131 pp. Personal copies with bookplate of magazine's editor, Edward M. Lind.

 

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. The Pagan, which appeared 27 years later, was noted as one of the more sophisticated literary zines, and the primary editor Lind discusses in an early essay the difficulty of editing for quality within the all-submissions-accepted tradition of the Amateur Press. The journal's taste tends toward personal essays and the more Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite strains of mainstream Victorian poetry, though as with most Amateur Press magazines it devoted far more space to criticism of amateur writers and journals, and especially to the interminable and seemingly substanceless internal politics of the NAPA than to printing literature itself. This unique bound copy of the journal's first two years collects Lind's own personal copies, as declared by his bookplate.