A Homemade Magazine for Anyone With Something to Say

There's a painted box on the porch of Urban Foxes in the Belhaven Heights neighborhood of Jackson. It doesn't look like much from the outside, but pull it open, and you'll find a rotating selection of handmade publications covering punk music, immigrant rights, trans visibility, DIY culture, and whatever else someone felt strongly enough to staple together and share. It's called the Landmass Library, and it's free.

Lucy Isadora started it after years of reading and making zines herself. "I had been dreaming of making a zine distro box," she says.

When Cody Cox at Urban Foxes raised the idea of having a zine presence at the venue, she grabbed an old apartment catalog box, painted it, and put it on the porch. The name came from a Weather Channel slight. A broadcaster once referred to Mississippi as "a landmass" between Louisiana and Alabama, as if the state didn't quite exist on its own terms. Isadora latched onto it.

"I think a lot of people overlook Mississippi, people who are otherwise very knowledgeable and well-traveled and culturally appreciative. I wanted to reference that thing of being overlooked and forgotten about."

What's a Zine, Exactly?

If you've never held one, Lucy has a definition: "A zine is a homemade magazine, usually about something kind of niche, usually shared for free or sold for very little profit. They usually look pretty handmade — lots of collage-type art, sometimes they're kind of wonky." The format dates to the punk and sci-fi fan communities of the mid-twentieth century, built on the premise that you don't need a publisher or a budget to have something worth saying.

The Landmass Library stocks a monthly rotation that includes Columbus Collective, a collective art zine out of Columbus, Mississippi; Razorcake, an independent punk publication from Los Angeles; Maximum Rocknroll out of San Francisco; and the Counterforce, an anti-corporate online project. Isadora also prints zines she finds online and adds her own work when the moment calls for it.

Counterculture and Community Access

Running a free library might seem at odds with zine culture's scrappy, anti-establishment roots, but Isadora doesn't see a tension there. "Everything has a barrier to access these days, including reading," she says. "It's very countercultural to give people literature for free."

The Landmass Library also anchors a zine club, where people gather, make things, and share them. Jackson's zine makers are more active than most people realize. Isadora names Justin Ransburg, Arin at JXN Underground, Sahana Mahasweran, and Zach at Psychic Hand Tapes as people doing compelling work right now. "I wish everyone made zines," she says.

Just Make the Thing

For anyone curious enough to try, Isadora's advice is characteristically direct: "I'd tell them to send it to me, because I want to read it."

That openness gets at something larger about what the Landmass Library represents and what Jackson's DIY community has always understood. "A lot of people don't know how much of the fun stuff that happens in Jackson is totally DIY," Isadora says. "People all over town put on their own events, concerts, art clubs, completely on their own and without sponsorship from a company, just because they want to have something like that where they live. Everyone who comes to zine club or grabs a zine from the Landmass Library is making a decision to make their own fun. That's one of my favorite things about Jackson."

The box is on the porch. It's free. And if you've been looking for a community of people who make their own fun, challenge the status quo, and believe that everyone has something worth saying, they're already here. You just have to know where to look.