The Thousands

It’s noticeable that most of the people who’ve ended up working on Format over the past three years – Joel Catchlove, Ianto Ware, Sam Rodgers, Simon Loffer – have all been zine publishers. I think there’s something inherent to working in a genre that has no pretence of quality or a career path. It teaches you to take the innocuous and irrelevant seriously. One of my favourite ever zines, Weston Willis’ classic Junktown, describes it as follows:

"I try to keep in mind the big picture, that only the luckiest of us will be around for the point when, from then on, we can look forward to more funeral announcements than wedding invitations. And, perhaps, in the absence of the possibility of resisting it, the best you can do is spend some time making something, generate something beyond just your presence in the world. Even better if you can make something and share it, regardless of personal gain. I suppose that’s what the idea of DIY is really getting at. That we can create our own geeky little culture, apart from the mainstream swill, a dorky share session for each cutesy little flame that is our own lives."