So, today we had a discount London day, heading to the London Zine Symposium. Kathryn and I have discussed (her suggestion, and an awesome one at that) the creation of a zine for a while; and while we were in Brighton I spotted the card advertising it, and so we headed in today…
…and it was cool. There were many zines to be had, and even at the discount zine price of £0.50 – £1 which most zines occupy we managed to spend a fair few quid. Not helped by my picking up a self-published book (I nearly got the Rick Dakan / Geek Mafia book too, but had run out of change) and some of the other more spendy things.
We also had some very nice cake (well, I had cake, Kathryn had muffin); we were very good and took our food with us tho’.
Anyhow, it has reawakened a desire to do a zine, although with my mind working the way it does it’d probably best be called ‘off topic’ ;) but one of the things I also fancied, and discussed with Kathryn is whether we could get hold of a banda machine to reproduce it. I’ve always fancied playing with one and did try to convince my parents to let me grab one when the school chucked them (in the end we rescued an ancient photocopier, but ended up stripping it for entertaining bits, like the eye-damagingly-bright light because it was totally knackered) but never ended up with one.
However, finding a spirit duplicator (or gestetner as I call them (I have a feeling roneo-vickers made them too)) has turned out to be harder than I thought. Whilst I knew it was obsolete technology of the most obsolete kind I imagined it’d still lurk on e-bay. But no. Searches for spirit duplicator / ditto (the US name) /Â banda and roneo-vickers have revealed a marked absence of anything. I tried Slough’s freecycle without so much of a whisper… I fear that this may be a plan that fails.
Of course, I think we’d also have to find a dot-matrix printer to produce the original on, too. But I love the idea… So, I know this is hardly a well read journal, but some of my friends work in education, or are at uni, so could ask around. If any of you can find a 24pin dot matrix and a banda (ideally with some of the purple magic paper (I had a whole pack once!) and some copying spirit) then you would rock my little world :)
And that, my dears, is all.
