Professional Documents
Culture Documents
10 & 11
Prompt: For this semester so far, we have been looking at books in traditional forms: codices
with two covers, a spine, and stacks of pages. In Unit Three: “Moving Books,” we are going to
turn our critical eye to alternative book formats that challenge the notion we have of books as
factory-made, industrial objects. We will looking especially at what we call “ephemera,” written
or printed materials, originally expected to have only short-term usefulness or popularity.
The types of handmade ephemera we will be working with include scrap paper, broadsides,
hand-stitched chapbooks, and zines.
For assignment #3, you will be making your own piece ephemera: a zine that reinterprets a
theme from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Guidelines:
1. You will choose a specific zine format:
a. Multipage
i. A folio-style (pages folded in half); binding (staple, stitch, hole punch) 3
sheets of paper
ii. A multi-page quarto-style (pages folded in quarters); binding (staple,
stitch, hole punch) 6 sheets of paper
b. Single-page
i. eight-sided fold with text on front and back 2 sheets of paper (so you’ll
have two separate zines)
2. Choose a major theme from Frankenstein that you would like to interpret and
communicate in zine form (you can be as creative with interpretation as you like)
3. Include anything you want: art, photos, poetry, etc. However, you will want to make sure
that you are quoting from the text to help communicate your theme. Be as creative as
possible
4. With your zine, you will submit a short writing statement (no more than 200 words) that
explains your theme and what you learned from this assignment.
5. You will turn in your hardcopy version to me and I will make photocopies, so we can
exchange and share.
Xu Lizhi poetry:
https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-
poetry
F’18 ENG 102.10 & 11
11/6 Elizabeth O’Brien, “Zines: A Personal History” Journal Entry #1 What are
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Ch. 19 some regular features of the
broadsides? What were
broadsides used for?