Collating Parties

A collating party was an event where friends were invited over to physically help put together the finished pages of a fanzine. It was a volunteer effort and a major social event.

“Print shops used to charge a LOT extra for collating.  I was fortunate that aside from the very first issues of my first zine in 1975, which were only 20-30 pages along, I didn’t have to do that as I found a print shop in the San Francisco Bay Area that specialized in small press books, and because they had specialized equipment collating was free.

In a collating party, stacks of individual pages were placed in sequence around the perimeter of a table.  Zineds (zine editors) would invite local fans over, and people would walk around the table picking up pages in sequences - over and over and over again, until the process was complete and the zines could be bound.“ - CatalenaMara, message from a private mailing list (January 2018), quoted here with permission

Illustration from Crossed Sabers #3, artist Tian