I enjoy attending indie comix and zine festivals and throwing money around everywhere and bringing home bulging sacks of weird little books that then sit in a growing pile of things I have not read. This is in some ways a worse situation than the traditional and time-honored pursuit of buying ordinary books and not reading them, because at least those look handsome on a bookshelf, spine-out. What to do with my hoard of stapled-and-folded treasures, which turn invisibly anonymous when squeezed onto a shelf amongst their square-bound peers?

A couple of weekends ago I happened upon this solution: Obtain and install a bookshelf scored with a long groove or two, designed less for storage than display. (I’m no woodworker, so I found a Marie Kondo-branded “kid’s bookshelf” at the Container Store, and removed one of its slats.) Choose set of a dozen or so zines from your collection, around any theme or none, and set them on the shelf. Put all your other zines in one or more archival boxes. And then, whenever the mood strikes, rotate out some or all of the books. Maybe share your screenshot on social media every now and then, with shoutouts and links to the creators.

This has worked insofar as I have started reading several books that I obtained a year or more ago. My first setup favored cartoonists who were active on Mastodon. I might very well share more later, as the collection slowly rotates. I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.