TORONTO, October 28: It’s a crisp Sunday morning and a guy in his twenties, wearing a brown suit, handlebar mustache, and newsboy cap, is sitting on the front steps of the Gladstone Hotel smoking a pipe. It’s just a few days before Halloween, but this doesn’t appear to be a costume. Down the street, for blocks in either direction, bikes are locked to every post and tree, their rusty chrome fenders shining dully in the autumn sun. Strolling past the man with the pipe, up the steps, and into the hotel is a steady stream of young and equally hip-looking kids dressed in vintage sweaters and thick-framed glasses. They wear Chuck Taylors and knitted scarves and have come here, the ones who didn’t bike that is, from across the country. They bear boxes full of photocopied and stapled pages, CDs, postcards, and all manner of homemade artsy things. They have come to participate in the indie culture extravaganza that is Canzine.   

Now in its twelfth year, Canzine is one of the country’s largest gatherings of independent publishers, zine-makers, and crafters of weird, funky stuff. Broken Pencil, a quarterly magazine covering all things Canadian and indie, organizes the event, and has seen it grow from a few tables in the mid-'90s to its present size. The attendance of more than 200 exhibitors, attention from the mainstream press, and the capacity crowd attest both to the event’s popularity, and to the growing scope of indie culture in Canada. There are two Canzines, in fact: One in Halifax, also convened by Broken Pencil, took place October 20.

Inside the Gladstone (a restored Victorian building and a central point in Toronto’s burgeoning Queen West art scene), tables are lined across every square foot of floor space from the lobby to the ballroom to the bar. The second floor is equally crammed, with exhibitors spilling into the open doors of emptied hotel rooms. Lindsay Gibb, Broken Pencil’s editor, sees Canzine as a unique opportunity for zine publishers to meet each other, attract new readers, and exchange ideas. “It started as a way to expose zines and bring the whole community together,” she says.

While there’s plenty of art, crafts, and ephemera to be seen, zines are still the mainstay of Canzine, and make up the bulk of what’s on display. While the term zine means any independently published magazine, the things people write about in zines tend to be things you wouldn’t normally see in the pages of, say, Maclean's or Chatelaine. There are zines devoted to the Canadian underground punk scene, post-feminist decoupage zines, and zines that are all about crocheting. Basically, pick something that kids at university are into, and you can bet there’s someone making a zine about it.

Spread across one table in the bar are stacks of a zine called Topyx, the brainchild of two Montreal undergrads named Michael and Andrew (they declined to reveal their last names). Printed on regular sheets of black-and-white photocopy paper folded in half, their latest issue is called "Assbusters" (a play on the anti-consumer site Adbusters). A collection of satire, humor, and excessive weirdness, it’s part MAD magazine, part Vice, and contains a review of the Bratz movie, a list of “new characters” from Laguna Beach (one of whom is called Hot Wheelz), and an article on child beauty pageant winners called “The Top 4 Under 4.” Michael, who’s studying psychology at McGill, has been creating zines since he was in junior high. For a dollar, anyone who’s interested can have the latest issue of Topyx, as well as all three of their special editions called, respectively, "YR Health," "The Pizza Issue," and "McLeans Guide to Canadian University."

Although Topyx is obviously the product of much time spent on the Internet, when asked whether they ever publish online, they shake their heads. “We’re not ready to make that leap yet,” says Michael, wryly, to which Andrew adds, “Yeah, the information superhighway moves a little too fast for me.”  In their hesitance to fully embrace the electronic age, they are not alone. Despite the relative ease of publishing online, many zine-makers still prefer to do things the old-fashioned way.

Another such exhibitor is Zeesy Powers, a Toronto-based artist. Powers is selling a photocopied zine called 3 Minute Girlfriend, a collection of correspondence she received in response to a Craigslist posting she made earlier this year. It’s exactly what it sounds like: Powers promised to be the girlfriend of anyone who showed up, for exactly three minutes, on a predetermined day in March from 6 to 9 pm. Part of an art piece Powers created by the same name, 3 Minute Girlfriend is filled with a huge array of queries, many of them absolutely sincere, and makes a surprisingly compelling read.

One of the biggest changes Gibb has seen in the 10 years she’s been organizing Canzine is the influx of music, video, and especially crafts. One booth sells tea towels with “Bite Me” crocheted on them, a table offers knitted “sex toy cozies,” and another sells T-shirts silkscreened by hand with Natalie Portman’s smiling face on them. There are also greeting cards made from Polaroid photos, hand-stitched pillows with cute little birds on them, and enough homemade mini buttons to sink a very trendy battleship.  
 
As important as Canzine is in helping zine-makers cohere, it’s also an opportunity for them to profit from their hobby, or more likely, break even. “At something like this,” says Gibb, “they sell more at once than they ever would otherwise.”  Even so, she admits, people don’t do it for the money. “I think part of it is that the things they feel passionate about aren’t represented in the mainstream media,” says Gibb. “They just want a way to express themselves and share their creations with other people.”

Back at the Topyx table a few hours later, Michael and Andrew have been steadily selling copies of their zine, as well as trading them with other vendors. “Yeah, we’ve made about $500 dollars already,” says Michael, rattling a pile of change that appears to be substantially less than that. “That’s why we do this,” he says. “It’s definitely for the money. And the babes.”

Jeremy Freed is a freelance writer based in Toronto.