It’s a busy Saturday at Gallery 5.
It’s a busy Saturday at Gallery 5. The 2009 Richmond Zine Fest is in its final throes, and inside RVA’s hippest gallery space, the floors are crowded with folks from all over our fair city. It’s wall-to-wall and table-to-table zines, and sitting in the main room, behind a stacked paper skyline, is unassuming Taylor Ball. His tables (that’s tables with an “s”) look even more crowded than the Zine Fest itself, and behind the rows of casual browsers and hardcore hipsters, the owner and operator of Parcell Press is smiling. It’s been a busy Saturday.
Since 2003, Taylor’s been at the helm of the zine, comic, and book production machine that is Parcell Press. While he was an English major at the University of Mary Washington—just a stone’s throw up 95 from his Richmond hometown—Taylor began looking for an outlet for his creative energies. So, with his years of zine experience, the internet, and some can-do attitude, he hunkered down in his little bedroom on Parcell Street, and got to work.
“My last year of school, I ran Parcell Press out of a basement closet-office at a house [I] shared with friends,” he said. “I didn’t sleep much and definitely worked in that closet-office a whole lot into the wee hours.”
Today, what began as a hobby for Taylor has grown into a burgeoning e-empire. ParcellPress.com features close to 200 different zines and other works available for sale, and since the company’s humble beginning, it has distributed thousands of titles to thousands of readers across the country. But more than that, even though he is proud of Parcell Press’ success, Taylor remembers to—as the kids say—keep it real.
At the company’s heart it is far more than a mild-mannered zine distributor; it is Taylor’s commitment to amplifying voices and supporting artistic and literary innovation in the print world. This type of sincerity and passion are the things valuable street cred is made of, and they just might be the winning ingredients of Parcell Press. And people are starting to take notice.
“Parcell Press has been involved since our first year, and Taylor has been a dynamic and productive organizer for the 2007 and 2008 years,” said Zine Fest organizers. “We love the work that he does.”
Taylor and his tables were a strong presence at this year’s Zine Fest. With close to 50 distributors and hundreds of folks passing through Gallery 5’s double-doors, Fest organizers say this was the biggest turnout in the show’s three-year history. It’s hard to believe, but near the end of the ‘90s, zines’ popularity had begun to wane and critics and other such people with letters after their names were dismissing the genre as a fad. But zines have never been the most fashionable things.
Professor Wikipedia traces what we today call “zines” all the way back to the first American printing presses. The countless pamphlets and essays published by those early print barons and their indentured servants (located mostly in Philadelphia) featured a wide range of topics and small print runs, much like today’s zines. As the years went on, the relative ease and affordability that make zines so attractive to the poor and the put-out kept them popular. They became adopted by just about anyone with something to say, from sci-fi nerds to punk rock patriots. Today, zines remain an important expressive outlet for the dissidents, the marginalized, and the bored among us, just as they were some 250 years ago. Thanks to the guys at Parcell Press, and other Richmond-based distributors like Click Clack Distro and Approaching Apocalypse Distro, zines are coming back into the spotlight.
A lot of the reason for zines’ tenacity is the fact that the medium isn’t confined to any one subject or style. Literally, anyone can write anything about anything. Zines aren’t a genre; they’re a community, and in recent years that community has grown, especially in our little, PBR-lovin’ town.
“Within the last decade or so, zine fests have become a really popular way for people to gather over a weekend to share, buy, sell, and hang out,” said Taylor. “Of the handful of cities that host successful fests year after year, I feel Richmond has established a great reputation for hosting one of the larger and better-organized fests, and proves there’s a very active group of organizers in Richmond and plenty of people in and around town who come out to support it.”
This year’s Zine Fest may have shut its doors, and the stacks of zines been packed away, but it sounds like next year’s is going to be bigger and better, and the only people more excited than the Kinko’s man are Richmond’s devoted zinesters.
“This year’s Fest was so cool because it was like nothing I’d really seen before, everything all in one place like that,” said Fest fan Bree Langford. “I’m really excited to see who they bring in next year.”
We won’t have to wait until next year’s fest to get our fix; Parcell Press is always open for business, with a title for every taste. In the meantime, Bree and the rest of us have plenty to read until next year, when we’ll get to see what Taylor and his friends bring to town.
