Hello, wonderful zine pals!
We hope you all had a beautiful February, and I am here today to tell you all about ours!
We kicked off the month by launching our Pop-Up Zine Shop at Paradise Palms, which ran all through February, and we might be continuing on into this month as well! We took over the old Crisps Shop at the front of Palms, just before you get to the bar, and set it up with all our zines, pins, jewellery, stickers, postcards, zine distro, and more! It looked fantastic if we do say so ourselves! The team (aka Katie, and I) were there every Sunday, and the Palms’ staff sold our zines behind the bar for the rest of the time when we weren’t there. It worked really well, and we LOVE being in the Paradise Palms space! Edinburgh folks, if you haven’t been, do pop along! The vibes are IMMACULATE and the food is so so good!
“All welcome, who welcome all… Paradise Palms is an LGBTQ friendly venue, all are welcome in our warm embrace so long as you mean no harm or ill will to others. We are an equal opportunities employer and support the living wage for new recruits. We ensure there is genuine diversity amongst our team, the performers we engage with and the artists we work alongside – without this diversity, we feel we would not be able to reflect the colourful clientele we are lucky to have frequent our wee party palace. The culture we promote is inclusive and everyone is treated equally in Paradise. Our venue and offices are run on 100% renewable energy which includes cooking with bio-fuel gas in our kitchen. We have banned all single-use plastic from our venue and all externally run events – this extends to all bar operations with the clients we work with. In support of these environmental efforts, we run a vegan/vegetarian menu and ensure strict recycling and waste reduction together with all efforts made to source materials or goods as locally as possible or from ethical suppliers. We, unfortunately, struggle to accommodate some wheelchair users as our toilets are on another level however we will always make extra space available for clientele if required. ‘Community’ is at the heart of Paradise Palms.“
I just want to take a moment to thank everybody who came out to support the Pop-Up, it really means a lot, and it was so lovely to meet you! Do stay tuned, as we are really keen to work more with Paradise Palms in the future… hopefully for more pop-ups, zine fairs, workshops, and more…
Speaking of! To finish off the month, we hosted a Zine Fair in Paradise on the last Sunday! Five supremely-talented zinesters joined us in our Palms takeover and we had the most fun and chilled-out day hanging out, eating delicious food, talking about art, and selling zines! Thank you so much to Mits Makes, Georgie Mac, Knight Errant Press, August from Door Ajar Comics, and yours truly for tabling your wares and making this zine fair a truly special event!
Two zine fairs in one month! We also tabled at Edinburgh Zine Fest this month! Thank you, Edinburgh Zine Library, for hosting a zinetastic event! We had a lot of fun meeting our zine pals, and we sold a whole bunch of zines! I hope we can table at more zine fairs this year! We always have so much fun!! Drop us a comment/message if you know of any other zine fairs running in Scotland this year!
This month, we got back to running our events! We hosted three workshops: two relationships themed mini-zine making workshops – one at Kafe Kweer in Edinburgh, and the other at Rad Apples in Dundee – and we trialed out a new venue with our gratitude journal-zine making workshop at Scrap Antics in Dundee. Stay tuned for more workshops at Scrap Antics coming soon, and do check out our Events Calendar to see all of the events and workshops we have coming up!
If you just clicked on our Events Calendar, you might have noticed we have a brand new website!! I really enjoyed designing it, and it is a lot more accessible and easy to navigate than our old website. I would really love to know what you think of it, do drop a comment down below with your thoughts!
On a personal note, I turned 30 this month!!! I had a mini-existential crisis – as I think you are supposed to do upon turning 30 – but I realised that creating Coin-Operated Press was a pretty awesome thing to have achieved before hitting this milestone, so I managed to bring myself back from the verge of a breakdown! Zines really do be the solution to every problem!
Last but not least for this month, we managed to take some time away from our busy events calendar to participate in a workshop! We attended the Queer Zines and Comics Workshop at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. We had a chance to explore the zines in the Museums Collection and see the Dundee Zine Library, as well as a chance to make our own mini-zines inspired by the collection. It was really inspiring to see some of the queer zines in the collection, and we always love having an opportunity to make the time to create our own zines! We might have some exciting news coming soon with the Dundee Zine Library, so do stay tuned for that announcement!
February was a fun and busy month, and we are excited to take this momentum forward into March to continue spreading the zine love!
See you soon zine pals!
Until next time…
Coin-Operated Chloe out.
Coin-Operated Press 