This site hosts the online catalogue of Olchar E. Lindsann's archival library of micropress publications, which currently contains approximately 3,000 chapbooks and zines (1,700 catalogued so far). Its emphasis is on the anglophone avant-garde of the last 30 years, but it also contains significant amounts of material from Anarchist, Socialist, and other radical countercultures with which it intersects and blends.
The diffuse, amorphous, complex, collaborative nature of the contemporary avant-garde, no longer concentrated in a few metropolises but exploded into hundreds of intersecting communities involving thousands of people strewn thinly all across the globe, was aptly described fifty years ago by Robert Fillou as the 'Eternal Network.' Since that time, this vast underground of countercultural workers has continued to grow and complicate itself; this archive has been collected and directed with this in mind, as one function of my own activity over the past 15 years as one node of the Network.
Therefore, in keeping with everything that DIY micropress publishing represents, the vast majority of these books were acquired as gifts or in trade for my own publications; most were acquired through the mail along with collaborations, mail art, and personal correspondence. The collection therefore represents one node of the Eternal Network, and the many connections spanning outward from it in many directions, followed to various distances, within a much larger and fabulously complex web of radical praxis that could never be circumscribed within a single library, even virtually. As such, the catalog and the archive itself serve not only as a library, but as a socio-historical document contextualising and relating together a fairly diverse array of communities, discourses, and ideas that have contributed to my own work and that of the communities in which I am most active.
With this in mind, the library is focused overwhelmingly on work produced within my own extended community: those with whom I have collaborated, directly or indirectly; have personally encountered in the course of my publishing, organising, performance, literary or theoretical work; and others with whom my collaborators have worked, whose books have been passed along to me, to the second, third, or fourth degree of separation. The chapbooks, zines and journals collected here have been printed after the advent of DIY printing technology, and with a few exceptions were produced by photocopier, desktop printer, or by hand; all were published by presses based in the DIY ethic.
This archive is co-ordinated with several others that I maintain, and exists in constant dialogue with them. The Post-NeoAbsurdist Archive (for which no catalog has yet been compiled) contains thousands of original documents, manuscripts, relics, and pieces of correspondence relating to the communities represented here. The Revenant Archive collects work by the avant-garde in 19th and early 20th centuries, before DIY publishing became a viable option for countercultural workers. The Southwest Virginia Punk Archive is a grassroots local history project, copies of whose zines are included here. mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, which I run, is not only fully represented here, but is the vehicle by which––via trade or collaboration––most of the books in the library have been acquired.
The collection serves several purposes. It is a reading and research library for myself, and available for use by independent researchers upon contacting me. It is often used for pedagogical purposes in high school classes, in workshops, exhibits and lectures. It also serves sometimes as a zine distro, when books from the archive are reprinted and distributed to collaborators, researchers, and friends.
Although both the nature of micropress itself and the mandate of the archive invalidate the idea of a comprehensive library of any kind, it does contain several complete or extensive collections that are unique or very rare, and may be of particular interest to researchers and avid readers of recent American avant-garde literature, or of local Southwest Virginia counter-culture.
- Post-NeoAbsurdist Collection: This is one of only three complete collections of all 152 publications of the international Post-NeoAbsurdist movement, including a full set of publications from my own mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press; one other complete set belongs to John M. Bennett, and one is housed in the Avant Writing Collection at the Ohio State University Special Collections Library (currently undergoing cataloging). It also contains complete runs by other Post-Neo presses including Mouse Milk Press, [Pro][Anti] Press, Appropriated Press, Punch the Fuck Out That Clock, The PNA Institute for Anti-Rational Affairs, and TLPress.
- Lost & Found Times: A rare full set of all 54 issues of the Lost and Found Times (1975-2005), edited by John M. Bennett, one of the most influential, experimental, and long-running avant-garde journals in North America during its lifetime.
- Luna Bisonte Prods: A very large collection of over 550 chapbooks issued by John M. Bennett's monstrously prolific and relentlessly experimental micropress, Luna Bisonte Prods, most of them post-2000 but going back to 1980. This includes nearly 500 eight-page TLPs (Tacky Little Pamphlets), an important bibliographic micro-form in the parts of the Eternal Network served by Luna Bisonte.
- Appalachian Zine Archive: About 60 zines produced in southwestern Virginia and the adjacent areas of that state, North Carolina, and West Virginia between 1983 and the present. Most were produced within the SW Virginia Punk community, and many copies in the library were re-printed from originals borrowed for a major ongoing DIY history project focused on that community; the collection is still being catalogued. It is the only extant collection of this material, though there are plans to donate other reproduced sets to the Virginia Room archive in Roanoke, VA and other archival libraries.
- Community High School Zines: Around 200 zines and chapbooks published by students of Community High School, a progressive alternative school at which I teach and administer the library. These include books by the CHS Zine Club (2014-present), CHS Avant-Garde Writing Club (2012-14), and books published by students in the course of various classes. Currently, the only full set is held in CHS's own library. It is still being catalogued (about half-way there).
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