Although it 's fairly certain that most zine publishers were readers of fanzines or other zines before they started their own zines, it 's uncertain how familiar, except by hearsay, most zine publishers are with these older publications. Nevertheless, many zine publishers have claimed affinity with these older publications, and apparently, like a whisper down the corridors of history, these works, just by the fact that they once existed, serve as both inspiration and influence to many of today 's zines. Aside from fanzines, the mimeographed poetry chapbooks of the 1940s and '50s produced by the Beat writers and poets of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance are generally cited as the most immediate source of today 's zines. Because of the small audience for these publications initially, the Beats and the San Francisco poets "perfected the small-run, beautifully crafted publications called chapbooks." According to zine publisher Michael Stutz: • "They mimeographed tons of stuff, little chapbooks and poetry rags—and all of this directly comes from the Greatest Living Poet, Allen Ginsberg. His background was trying to get the work of [he] and his friends (like Burroughs and Kerouac) out there in the public . . . when he hooked up with the SF [San Francisco] people, he did the same …show more content…
This practice increased in frequency as colonial America broke from Britain, with printers taking both sides, as Carl Berger describes in "Broadsides and Bayonets: The Propaganda War of the American Revolution": "From the beginning it was a war of words as well as gunpowder, with each major protagonist seeking to subvert and weaken the enemy camp with carefully prepared arguments." The strong parallel between the printers of the Revolutionary War era disseminating their political views via the broadside and pamphlet and zine publishers spreading their opinions and viewpoints via the zine formulates easily, especially because independence and autonomy operate so strongly in the activities