Joshua James organizes boatloads of zine events out in Portland and writes Basic Paper Airplane. When he’s not organizing, he puts out fine work like issue #9, an illustrated essay on the history of typewriters—with the history of James’s own typewriter collection blended in. Did you know there were over fifty patents taken out for typewriters in the nineteenth century? Some of them look like the underside of a lawnmower, others,a basketball with a hundred nails stabbed into it. James’ prose snaps along and boils down what must have been some dense research reading into a conversational mini-documentary. With the sepia-colored cover and wider pages—how to describe its layout, a bit like a yellow pad, opened vertically?—I felt like I fell into one of those PBS specials, narrated by Peter Coyote while a radio is humming lightly in the background. –Jim Joyce (Antiquated Future, PO Box 42081, Portland, OR 97242)