Library Stocks Obscure D.I.Y. Mags

If you’re looking for Updike, you’ve got the wrong place. At the Papercut Zine Library, a relatively new addition to the Harvard Square literary scene, you’re more likely to find a guide to raising rabbits than Rabbit Run.

A stone’s throw away from Lowell House and the Lampoon, the Zine Library occupies a small room inside the faded, wood-paneled building at 45 Mt. Auburn Street. The house, home-base to the Harvard Social Forum (HSF) activist coalition, was once a Harvard frat, and before that, a gentlemen’s club. Today, it is a mecca for young radicals, leftists, and anarchists, many of them Harvard students affiliated with HSF and the rest Boston locals just there for the zines.

For those not so steeped in 1980s Do It Yourself (D.I.Y.) culture, zines can be magazines, journals, booklets, pamphlets, or stapled sheets of paper. They can be literary magazines, political pamphlets, comics, or even cookbooks—and Papercut’s got them all.

Open since May, the library is run by a dozen or so volunteers, who maintain the room in return for the free space. Although the two groups are not “technically affiliated,” according to former HSF President Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07, who is also a Crimson editor, they do “share a mutual goal of providing alternative information and education.”

And by alternative, Gould-Wartofsky means everything from the radical to the bizarre—whether it’s raising rabbits or delineating the principles of socialism, learning to bake vegan brownies or appraising the coiffure of John Quincy Adams. Bookshelves are filled with out-of-print zines. “Stolen Sharpie Revolution,” is filed near “Things You Can Stab While Riding A Bike Carrying A Sword.” One shelf over? “Bad Hair of the 90s.”

And you thought Widener had a good selection.