Welcome to my nightmare. I think you’re going to like it.
Had anyone told me that I would put out another issue of Cashiers du Cinemart I would have laughed in their face. Why then did I not laugh at Benn and Rachel at Atomic Books when they told me about The Revenge of Print? Maybe because I was riding high, having experienced the best night of my autumn 2010 tour in support of Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection. Maybe I had been secretly itching to do another issue. Or, maybe I was on a sugar rush thanks to the Charm City Cakes rendition of Jim Rugg’s Impossibly Funky cover art (thank you, Andrea!). Whatever it was, the idea got stuck in my craw and I was sending out a call for submissions in no time.
What is The Revenge of Print? It’s a challenge issued by longtime zine supporters Atomic Books and Quimby’s to zinesters: make one more issue of their zine in order to combat the demise of the print medium. Print is suffering. When I unleashed CdC #15 in 2007, I found that many of the independent stores with which I had dealt in the past had disappeared. And, as I write this, the ink on the death certificate for the second-largest chain bookstore in the country, Borders, isn’t even dry. It’s hard out here for a pimp.
You’ll find a lot of familiar names in CdC #16; Rich Osmond, Skizz Cyzyk, David MacGregor, Chris Cummins, Mike Sullivan, Andrew Rausch. You’ll also find some new names. In my travels for Impossibly Funky I ran into a lot of loyal CdC readers who wanted to put in their two cents; Joshua Gravel, Ralph Elawani, Jef Burnham, Karen Lillis, Kyle Barrowman. And then there’s Dion Conflict, longtime reader and friend. Dion has been threatening to unleash his particular brand of film criticism on me for a while; now the whole world can enjoy it.
Thanks to everyone who has been supportive of Cashiers du Cinemart and Impossibly Funky. I won’t promise an issue #17 but stranger things have happened.
Mike White
July, 2011
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