Project for the Page
The Infinite Fanzine: A Masterflat Archive from Fanzinoteca La Pipette Noir is a workshop folded in on itself. A masterflat designed to be taken apart, photocopied, recomposed and reshuffled into new publications. From a single volume originate potentially infinite variants.
The volume gathers 13 signatures held to the cover by CMYK waxed cotton ribbons that can be easily removed and used during fanzine‑making workshops as working material. Eleven visual zines map the thematic constellations that structure FLPN’s archive: art, photography, activism, music, comics, narrative, poetry, recipes, DIY, role‑play, and magazines. The images in each category speak to how these themes intersect with the history of the fanzine and with the role of self‑publishing in the development of these fields. The signatures are designed to be handled—lifted from the page, recombined, and used to build one’s own fanzine—supported by an empty signature included specifically for that purpose.
Alongside the visual signatures, a textual one addresses the role of the fanzine in the histories of self‑publishing and the democratisation of access to knowledge. A poster folded inside the cover gathers all the covers in FLPN’s collection to date, together with a concise bibliography on fanzine history.
Project for the People
The publication grows out of a collaboration between the fanzine archive La Pipette Noir, coordinated by Valeria Foschetti, and Shibboleth from April to October 2025. Over these months, Shibboleth designed and ran free intergenerational publishing workshops at the Civic Library of Calvairate in Milan, using the FLPN’s collection as a working tool. The workshops were conceived to understand how different audiences encounter the archive: what draws them in, what fails to hold their attention, what makes them linger, what brings them back.
The book is a workshop folded in on itself. It functions as a masterflat: every page is designed to be photocopied, cut, rearranged, and reassembled into a new fanzine. From a single book, potentially infinite publications can be produced. Publishing here is approached not as the creation of fixed structures but as the making of repeatable, adaptable and open models. The binding reflects this logic: the cotton ribbons hold the signatures together without fixing them permanently, allowing the book to be taken apart and put back together as needed.
This approach exemplifies Shibboleth’s social publishing practice, which develops tools that archives and institutions can use to activate their collections in community settings, contributing to a shared understanding of publishing as a cultural and political act. The fanzine becomes both subject and method—an archival study that remains alive only when it is put back into circulation.
The book is intentionally simple to reproduce—infinitely photocopiable, endlessly distributable—so that Valeria can keep her workshops free and unbound by the constraints of professional printing. This reproducibility pays direct homage to the countercultural economies of the fanzine and the DIY infrastructures that sustain them. Coherently, it carries no ISBN.
Publishing and Design: Shibboleth / Research and Texts: Valeria Foschetti / Printing: Nava Press, Milan. 2026, English and Italian, softcover, edition of 500, A5, 208 pages. Cover: Stone Paper bound by hand with 13 CMYK waxed cotton ribbons. Content: 13 signatures on Nautilus Grey 100gr. Poster: Dozio Pergamin 100gr. Hand bound. No ISBN.
The project is supported by La Scuola dei Quartieri, a fund from the Municipality of Milan and the European Union through the programme Coesione Italia 2021–2027 Metro Plus e Città Medie Sud.
