INK AND PAPER

TSLR051 was released at our interesting draw at Reading on Sunday. Interesting in that everyone who wasn't an Albion fan thought the game utterly dire, whereas us educated types fawned over the return of the tiki-taka.

The fanzine, which we only managed to sell to a handful of you, was printed on a slightly different paper this month.  Like petrol and dairy products for example, a little bit of global warming can influence something as silly as a fanzine.  Some funny weather somewhere in the world has an impact on paper prices, and suppliers will ship in different - or thinner in our case - stock until we can chop down some new trees in Brazil or whatever.

Now, oddly enough, we're big fans of thin paper here at TSLR.  It's part of our ethos to be non-glossy, to be anti-club in aesthetic at the very least.  Thin paper, like newsprint for example, is actually quite specialist though, and thus quite pricey.  We normally have the cheapest paper which is the same stuff you get in an office.  It's not nice but it means that we can keep the fanzine at £1.

Our printer, a gentleman from Birmingham called Dave, has been printing TSLR for 2 seasons and it;s great to work with him. He is the Editor of the Blues fanzine Made In Brum, and prints the fanzines for, off the top of our head, Donny, Burnley, Liverpool, Plymouth, Cov, Blackburn, Southend and a few more that we can't remember right now.  We visited the pressing plant last season to see where the magic happens and where surprised to find just 2 small machines; a risograph printer (top) and a sort of compiling machine that folds and staples (above).

It's simple stuff, but they work very hard.  With all the contributors penning their articles, us Co-editors putting it all together, and then Dave printing it up there in the Midlands, it's a testament to the hard graft that everyone in the fanzine community puts in that these things are only a quid.

Get in touch if you would like an introduction to Dave for your fanzine projects ... tslr at hot mail co uk ...We're sure he'll beat your current price.