#tealtriggs

[bethany-obrien-blog]

FANZINES- TEAL TRIGGS

A fascinating look into the D-I-Y strand of publishing, varying from its earliest existence in the 1950′s right up to modern day online e-zines. Dedicated to the history of fanzines, it’s a wonderful piece of visual art, choc-a-bloc full of photos of zines of all styles.

[martasdgaspar-blog]

'Fanzines' Fiasco

The first thing you expect from a book published by a course director at an Art University, is all the artists included in the book will be rightly credited and approved by said artist to be used in this publication.

Teal Triggs completely failed to do this ,and many other things, in her book 'Fanzines' such as copyright and many other general factual errors.

This book supposedly celebrates the zine culture, however from the chapter I read all it did was shame and ridicule anyone who even thought of embracing the technology currently available to us and using it to create a zine. Just because something began by being made a certain way due to necessity, it does not mean this can not be changed and improved. "Misses the point entirely of how constrained production was by resources and knowledge and simply not caring how something looked in preference to getting it published. Type cut from newspapers, had written notes and botched screen printed covers were accidents not deliberate design decision" as said in an Amazon book review by Mr. Makepeace, an artist who's zine was featured in the book and only found this out by accidently coming across the book 3 years after it was published. 

There are many other artists in this position, who were not notified or given a chance to give permission for Triggs to use their artwork for her own profit. Teal continuosly boasted the book "will establish the importance of this form of self-publishing", but if that had been true would she not have taken the time to contact all these artists BEFORE the book went to the printers? 

Well she didn't. The book was printed with work credited to the wrong people, with artists' old names who had spent half her life changing her name from that of an abusive father, with images clearly stating they are copyrighted and not to be used in for profit publications, and many other errors that would make this post a book in itself. The only thing she had to do to avoid all this bad publicity was do some google searches and send a couple of emails, nothing too high tech, nothing she wouldn't probably do on a daily basis and nothing that wouldn't have been worth the trouble. This publication seems completely disrespectful to anyone hoping to work in the creative industry, however what really worries me the most, is that she was the course director for the MA Design Writing Criticism at the university i am currently studying at, yet she didn't have the basic knowledge needed when publishing a book full of artists hard work.