Yeah ... and I guess what's interesting about the story is that no matter if you were an anarchist or entrepreneur, no editor could make F5 sustainable.

I'm aware of the problems people have with Microcosm and with other folks in the zine community, including the person I mentioned in the post. Like it or not, these folks are involved. Discussion/citation does not equal endorsement.

That's fair. I'm not as interested in that conversation as I am in pointing out how much he relied on Factsheet Five under Gunderloy's anarchism to explicate zine history and the politics of zines at that time.

That said, while he does dedicate a significant portion of Chapter 7 ("Purity and Danger") to F5 (subtitling it "FACTSHEET FIVE VERSUS FACTSHEET FIVE") most of the mentions of F5 show up in the endnotes and the methodology is never really laid out in the main body of the. text.

Thank you, Jolie! That's a good question. I don't know if it disappeared from the narrative as much as his book and F5 got acknowledged by subsequent scholars before they moved on to whatever research they were interested in (the uptick in citations after 2012 is really interesting to me.

In this post, I dig into this historiography and how Duncombe begun to predict subtly shifting politics within the underground (and the left more broadly) — a shift highlighted by the very cover art of the four editions. f5archive.org

Duncombe presents a highly readable study that relied heavily on Factsheet Five as an archive and via interviews with Gunderloy and Friedman.

Originally published in 1997 by @versobooks.bsky.social and subsequently re-pressed by @microcosm.bsky.social in 2008, 2017, and 2025, it is by far the most important piece of scholarship on zines, accumulating over 1,500 citations.

I do! Dm me your address!

I loved Yakuza!

sounded pretty tragic to me.

He just followed me on IG!