Cycling Zine Review
As you may know, we are collecting submissions for a collaborative zine about cycle touring, as part of the Virtual Cycle Touring Fest which happened a few weeks ago. We set up our tent in the living room to watch the webinars, and decided whilst we were there we would film a brief review of all the cycling zines we had at home. It’s by no means a comprehensive list of cycling / cycling adjacent zines, but we just wanted to give folks, especially those who might not have come into contact with zines before, a taste of what they can look like and be about.
We filmed it on instagram live, but since this isn’t the most accessible platform, we’ve now uploaded the video to Youtube, with proper subtitles, and you can watch it here.
We also thought we’d better do a quick blog run through of the zines and where we got them!
Chainbreaker Bike Book
We got this from WordPower book in Edinburgh, which is now the excellent Lighthouse Books (find them here). Whilst this doesn’t look like a zine, its actually half repair manual, half reprints of four issues of chainbreaker bike zine (the originals were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina). We actually lugged this book with us on our first bike tour! it was our intro to bike maintenance, and to zines!
Londonderry Vol 1 and Vol 2 (Bike Touring)
Multi-lingual zines (English, French and Spanish) from the Montreal-based cyclo-feminist collective Les Derailleuses. These zines are physically incredibly satisfying, the first is bound with an inner tube, and the second has an individual lino printed (?) cover. We got these from Microcosm online. Have a browse here.
Asking for Elephants
This collaborative zine / wee book tackle the bicycles radical potential with lots of excellent contributions from some awesome folks talking about class, money, poverty, equity, protest, and social justice. This is published by microcosm, but we bought it at housman’s radical bookstore in kings cross in London. Find them here.
Cyclista Zine
This is the newest zine in our collection – it arrived in the post a few weeks ago because we support cyclista on patreon (and you should too!) It focuses on sharing knowledge and the stories of BIPOC and WTF folx in cycling, and this issue is about the intersection between DIY culture and bike culture and is just so good. You can buy a digital copy, find out more here.
Like I say, this isn’t a comprehensive list of cycling zines, and if you’ve got any other suggestions hit us up!
If you want to contribute to the cycle touring collaborative zine, you have until the 23rd May and you can find out more here.
