Columbus has a long and plentiful history of folks D.I.Y.'ing it, whether it's music, gig space, music recording, or in this case, writing. Specifically, the formerly all analog and currently mostly digital music zine. Ricki C, who can often be found contributing at Pencilstorm, explained the history of the 1970s zine Teenage Rampage on his blog:
Teenage Rampage was born when the Service Merchandise store copy machine was moved from the front office to the warehouse because we had to make so many more copies: of purchase orders, bills of lading, packing slips, etc. At some point we realized there was a way to turn the counter of the copier back one entire digit, i.e. we could make 300 copies but only 30 showed up on the counter. Voila, I had a publishing empire. (I can't tell you how many times our store manager of the time would comment, when he visited the warehouse to make front-office copies, "I can't understand how we're constantly out of copy paper when we're only making 100 copies." My good friend to this day Rob and I would shrug our shoulders and make some non-committal comment.)
I'd type up the issues at home on the trusty Royal typewriter that my sainted Italian father (see blog entry Birthday Blog, June 30th, 2013) had brought home for me in the 1960's, when I developed an interest in typing, from the Columbia Gas Of Ohio warehouse where he worked. (Is there ANY aspect of the creation of Teenage Rampage that does not include petty theft of office materials?) I'd post a lookout outside the warehouse office and run off maybe a hundred copies at a time. (Said lookout failed miserably at his job at least once during production of the mag when the store manager walked in on me while I had about 100 pages of issue two spread out all over the copy area. I just threw some purchase order copies over the top of them and tried to gather them up as calmly and innocently as I could. By luck, nothing came of it. I could have gotten fired for that infraction and I needed that job.)
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