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
I spent many, many first nights of MediaWest sitting on the floor in Susan M Garrett’s hotel room, collating and binding ‘zines. Usually while @annlarimer drew things and laughed at me.
I used to belong to an APA that had in-person distribution and collating parties; it was a lot of fun.
