In the middle to late eighties, Factsheet Five was a Bible to a lot of people. Mike Gunderloy was the editor then, an apparently tireless man who reviewed thousands and thousands of privately published things called "zines" — he was absolutely I-don't-know-what -- he believed that anyone who put in the work to publish something should be announced and reviewed. You had your punks, nazis, poets, anarchists. You also had your "perzines" — personal zines, self-published journal entries aimed toward the world. I forget what Gunderloy's review of Robin Plan's perzine was, but I remember the force of his recommendation — and I sent off my dollar or two, with a letter, and got Robin's first perzine back, with a letter also, which said, in part: "I started my own zine because I saw other people were publishing the kinds of things I was writing and have been all my life. I draw support from the Womens Movement, where truth telling in art is given high honors. � Punk rock and the Do It Yourself ethic it is founded on is also an enduring inspiration."

Robin Plan's zines cannot be duplicated on the internet. What you miss are the occasional episodes of real handwriting, the Xeroxing of page after page, the plastic cover binding each issue, which you can take apart so that you can take each single page in hand and be astonished by each one. What you find here, then, are versions of the original things: a good poster, not the painting itself, as it were.

"Suicide Notes" was first published in 1988; "Goodbye Radio" in 1989. You can get the paper versions by writing Robin. )

To see jpegs of the original zine covers, click here.

Write "Ellavon" at ellavon@ellavon.com.
Editor: Robert Basil. Special thanks to June Denbigh, Ray Szeto, and the Raylock Design Group.
Copyright retained by all contributors.