It's easy to imagine a time, in the not-too-distant future, when high school students will sit in class with iPad-like devices in their hands instead of books. They'll learn about a bygone era when their parents actually printed words on little sheets made of dead trees with a thick, gloopy substance called ink.

That era, it seems likely, will be recalled with the same nostalgia and romanticism with which we now remember the telegraph: a restrictive and inefficient system, born out of necessity and eventually outmoded by superior technology.

Somewhere in that lesson there might be a brief mention of the "zine," a ragtag subgenre of the vast print publishing world produced by teenage diarists, industrious punk rockers, freelance intellectuals and the slightly unhinged fans of B-movie actors.

In the meantime, before that frightening moment arrives, there is "Wide Margins: An Exhibition of 'Zines from the Sublime to the Silly," a show at the Western New York Book Arts Center that takes its own rather nostalgic look at the evolution of the zine form.

Click here to view a slideshow highlighting the exhibit.

This love letter to the printed word as rendered by the untrained poets, journalists, critics and thinkers of the world, attempts to draw attention to the zine as a unique form of cultural expression. It was the long-germinating brainchild of Western New York Book Arts Center founder Richard Kegler and exhibition co-curators Amy Greenan and Jessica Lewis.

The show consists mostly of Greenan's extensive collection of zines from around the world, acquired over two decades of wading through a once-limitless medium that now seems to be entering the twilight of its existence. Zines of all sizes and subjects hang from the walls in long strings and lie in messy piles on tables in the center's gallery, each begging to be picked up and read. It begins with proto-zines from the '60s by Andy Warhol and others, considers the '90s zine explosion kicked off by punk publications like "Bikini Kill" and contemplates the new directions the form is taking in the 21st century.

Greenan, a serious devotee of the form who has published her own respected zines ("Highest Population of Rock Stars," "Pumpkin") pegged the appeal of zine-making partly to its almost universal accessibility. Not even the self-publishing free-for-all of the Internet, which tosses pajama-clad basement bloggers into the same crowded arena as Harper Collins authors, can claim that.

"Certainly, anybody can do a blog, but you still need a computer," Greenan said. Zine-making is different: "It's so egalitarian, anybody can do it. You could literally start with a pen and some paper, and if that's all you had to work with, you could still make a zine."

What sets zinesters apart from your run-of-the-mill content creator has mainly to do with compulsion. Browsing through zines from the early and mid-'90s, when the form hit critical mass, you come away with the distinct impression that these handcrafted, surreptitiously photocopied documents simply had to be created. Their authors, whether skateboarders or punk enthusiasts, bicycle fanatics or self-styled poets, invented the medium as a makeshift container for their obsessions.

"It's a lot of work and relatively little payoff," Greenan said. "You really do it because you love to do it, not because you're expecting something."

Take, for instance, a short-lived and much-loved zine called "A Renegade's Handbook to Love and Sabotage," produced by Ciara Xyerra of Massachusetts from 2000 to 2002. The introduction to her first issue reads like a manifesto of the compulsive, confessional zinester:

"OH, HELLO," Xyerra wrote, as if caught off guard by her imagined reader. "I couldn't sleep at all last night because i was so excited to work on this zine. i couldn't stop imagining how i was going to do the layout & how many pages it would be. i even skipped my therapy appointment so i could get some rest and work on it all day."

Greenan called Xyerra's zine, which like so many others has since evolved into an online project (crabigailadams.wordpress.com), one of her favorites.

"Not only is it really charming to look at, but the content of this stuff is really intelligent, really super-smart and really opinionated," Greenan said. "She has a lot to say."

Finding a niche

A huge percentage of zines published in the '90s were about music. Buried somewhere in a pile of stapled booklets at the book arts center is an issue of "Caught in Flux," a zine published by former VH1 producer Mike Appelstein, which contains essays by various musical luminaries about how they discovered music.

"Even his record and show reviews were just really smart," Greenan said of Appelstein. "I like good writing, and you can find it in zines."

There is also an endless collection of niche-oriented titles that have taken to the zine format, such as "Bruce on a Stick," which identifies itself as "The World's Only Bruce Campbell Fanzine." It was published by someone named "Brian Disaster Ferrara" and contains such features as interviews with Campbell himself and a cut-out paper doll of the B-movie actor known for his role in Sam Raimi's cult films.

 But examples of outright kitsch in the exhibition are rare. Most zine authors1 are emotionally sincere and completely unabashed in their love for their hearts' desires. There are zines on bicycling, like "Chainbreaker," a labor of love about biking put out by New Orleans' Shelley Jackson -- "What is it about a bicycle that can bring a person so much joy?" the introduction goes.

Chris Fritton's "Pure Fun," a skating zine he published in the early '90s as a teenager in Lockport, contains instructions for readers to send him "pictures, artwork, money, interviews, stories, poems, garbage, letters, junk or just about anything" to his home address. There are even zines about zines, like "Stolen Sharpie Revolution," a charming, small-format book that tells you all you need to know to become a zinester yourself.

Taking a new form

As the cut-and-paste model of zine self-publishing gave way to the primacy of the Internet in the late '90s and the first years of the 21st century, the deluge of zines slowed to a trickle. They were replaced by an even greater number of online confessors, using early free publishing platforms like Geocities, Tripod and Livejournal (still popular among ex-zinesters) and eventually game-changing sites like Blogspot, Wordpress, MySpace and Facebook.

Now, in a culture ruled by the status update and the tossed-off tweet, the ranks of the labor-intensive zine culture have thinned considerably. Zines today, though far from extinct, have taken on a new shape and form.

With many modern zines, the focus has shifted away from content and toward form. If your only goal is to write about bicycle repair or steampunk, a blog is the obvious way to go. But if you care about the visual expression of that content, the Web only provides so much freedom, especially for those unaccustomed to HTML code and allergic to premanufactured templates.

"If you're hand-crafting something today, it's not the same as it was 20 years ago. You're doing it more deliberately," said Lewis, the exhibition's co-curator. "There's more of a politics to hand-crafting it yourself, and I think for that reason they're more interesting to look at sometimes. They're more visually centered."

A good deal of former zinesters are now devotees of the resolutely analog form of expression known as the book arts, an aesthetic step up from zines and the primary focus of the one-of-a-kind center at 468 Washington St. Both Greenan and local small-press publisher David McNamara are now book arts adepts, each using the do-it-yourself aesthetic they established in their zine days to make print projects that exist on their own as works of art.

Fritton, who has grown leaps and bounds since putting out "Pure Fun" as a teenager, now produces a seriously sophisticated publishing/art project called "Ferrum Wheel." Every year or so, Fritton enlists 50 artists from around the world to contribute 50 editions of one piece -- usually printed material -- which he then gathers into 50 creatively packaged publications. The current issue, Fritton's sixth, is bound up in a three-pocket canvas apron.

Other modern zine-esque projects are not quite as ambitious as "Ferrum Wheel," but many of those on view in the exhibition are more visually arresting than their '90s forerunners. There are, of course, still some standard pamphlet-sized zines being produced locally. The exhibition contains work by local zinesters like Jax Deluca, another by local teenager Cypress Mars ("The Pocket Guide to Feminism"), comix by Sal Sciandra and many others. Mark Wisz's early-'90s projects "Slack Magazine" and "Sign o' the Times" are also well-represented.

Though the era of Xeroxed zines as we know them seems to be drawing to a close, Greenan puts her faith in the rising popularity of the book arts. They are, in a sense, a reaction to the digitization of culture, a way to keep one foot planted firmly in the physical world.

"People are just becoming more and more aware of the possibilities about the form," Greenan said of the book arts' growing popularity. "People are realizing that it doesn't take a lot of effort to make it a little extra-special. Other people want to take a little extra time or find a nicer material. I think it's catching, like a disease. It's a nice disease."

cdabkowski@buffnews.comnull