In-Store: John R. Davis: Keep Your Ear to the Ground w/ Emily Flake

Event guidelines:

• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured books or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the books will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• The conversation will be livestreamed for free online here: https://youtube.com/live/MCQciH_bKGU
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

The first history of the fanzines that emerged from Washington, DC's highly influential punk community.

DIY culture has always been at the heart of DC's thriving punk community. As Washington, DC's punk scene emerged in the mid-1970s, so did the periodicals—"fanzines"—that celebrated it. Before the rise of the internet, fanzines were a potent way for fans to communicate and to revel in the joy of fandom. These zines were more than just publications; they were a distillation of punk's allure, connecting the city to the broader punk community. Fanzines remain a meaningful, tactile, creative medium for punk fans to connect with like-minded people outside the corporate-controlled world.

In Keep Your Ear to the Ground, the archivist and musician John R. Davis unveils the development of punk fanzines and their role in supporting DC's hardcore and punk scene from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. He sheds new light on DC's scene and highlights some of its key personalities, including many who are often left out of punk history, with high-quality images of rare zines and insights from numerous interviews with zine creators and musicians. This book vividly weaves together the origin of zines and their importance in underground communities.

For punk enthusiasts, zine creators, American studies scholars, and anyone who has ever felt like an outsider, Keep Your Ear to the Ground traces how the unique environment of Washington, DC, helped zines thrive.

John R. Davis is an archivist and the curator of Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland's Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. His articles and commentary appear in the Washington Post, NPR, Notes: The Journal of the Music Library Association, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Post & Post-Punk. He is a longtime participant in the Washington, D.C. punk community as a fanzine creator and as a musician in bands like Q And Not U. He lives with his family in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Emily Flake is a cartoonist, writer, comedian, illustrator, and teacher. Her work appears regularly in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s and many other publications. Her most recent book is Joke in a Box: How to Write and Draw Jokes. . She makes her home in Brooklyn and is the founder and proprietor of St. Nell’s, a residency program for women and non-binary creators working in any creative discipline, based in Williamsport, PA. She bakes a mean pie.

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