[sponsored_by name=”Brooklyn To Mars” url=”http://brooklyntomars.com/tagged/zine” logo=”https://brokelyn.com/app/uploads/2013/04/BrooklynToMarsLogo.jpg” byline=”Brooklyn To Mars is a limited edition, hand-numbered zine”]
Everyone wants a freakin Kindle nowadays. They’re so quick to move into the future and throw away the tactile pleasures of reading something that you hold in your hands and turn the pages yourself. I’ve beat this drum before and the odds are I’ll keep beating it. Because I like to repeat myself for one, but also because it’s an important subject to bring up. At the moment though, people who actually like the tactile sensation of paper going through their fingers can rest assured that Brooklyn is a place where reading on paper hasn’t been forgotten. My proof? Our love affair with zines, seen most clearly in the fact that the Brooklyn Zine Festival is having its second consecutive celebration of the medium this month. If you want to get yourself pumped for the festival of paper cuts, we’ve got three issues of Brooklyn to Mars, a hand-assembled, type-written zine made right here in Brooklyn to give away to you.
What the hell is Brooklyn to Mars? It’s a self-published magazine as old school as it gets. Publisher Markus Almond types every word on the paper himself, copies and assembles it himself and goes around drops it off at Spoonbill and Sugartown himself. Almond said the zine was originally a way to focus himself on his other business, running a music licensing company, but that he came to enjoy writing it so much that it’s become it’s own labor of love. And it is a labor: typing, cutting, pasting and copying all the pages in each issue takes over 20 hours. Which would explain why it only comes out twice a year and is limited to 100 issues for each run. Of course, despite the fact that Almond throws so much time into physically putting the zine together, if you’re curious about it, you can see the content at the zine’s website, and if you want one, you can even order it online if he has any copies left.
Writing helps keeps Almond’s mind clear and in a positive space now, and it’s reflected in Brooklyn to Mars‘ content, which has skewed mostly to the non-fiction side in its three issues. A lot of the prose is brief, two or three paragraphs that serve as reminders to take a step back and see the positives in life, with even briefer snippets of often funny fiction mixed in with the inspiration.
Sounds awesome huh? If you’re as excited about Brooklyn to Mars as we are, you can enter our giveaway and win the three copies of it that Markus has published so far. Maybe it’ll even be the thing that launches you into a new era of positive thinking. Crazier things have happened. We assume.
[rafflecopter id=”rc-x62r7olss”]