texts of all kinds, from the sacred to the
profane, and from the political to the personal". They provided
electronic texts without judging their content, in six
sections: (a) "E-zines": electronic periodicals from the
professional to the personal; (b) "Politics": political zines,
essays, and home pages of political groups; (c) "Fiction":
publications of amateur authors; (d) "Religion", mainstream and
off-beat religious texts; (e) "Poetry": an eclectic mix of
mostly amateur poetry; and (f) "Quartz": the archive formerly
hosted at quartz.rutgers.edu.

As recalled on the website in 1998: "The web was just a
glimmer, gopher was the new hot technology, and FTP was still
the standard information retrieval protocol for the vast
majority of users. The origin of the project has caused
numerous people to associate it with the University of
Michigan, although in fact there has never been an official
relationship and the project is supported entirely by volunteer
labor and contributions. The equipment is wholly owned by the
project maintainers. The project was started in response to the
lack of organized archiving of political documents, periodicals
and discussions disseminated via Usenet on newsgroups such as
alt.activism, misc.activism.progressive, and
alt.society.anarchy. The alt.politics.radical-left group came
later and was also a substantial source of both materials and
regular contributors. Not long thereafter, electronic 'zines
(e-zines) began their rapid proliferation on the internet, and
it was clear that these materials suffered from the same lack
of coordinated collection and preservation, not to mention the
fact that the lines between e-zines (which at the time were
mostly related to hacking, phreaking, and internet anarchism)
and political materials on the internet were fuzzy enough that
most e-zines fit the original mission of The Etext Archives.
One thing led to another, and e-zines of all kinds - many on
various cultural topics unrelated to politics - invaded the
archives in significant volume."

Another list, the E-zine-list, was launched by John Labovitz in
summer 1993 to list e-zines around the world, accessible via
FTP, gopher, email, the web, and other services. The list was
updated monthly.

What exactly is a zine? John Labovitz explained on his website:
"For those of you not acquainted with the zine world, 'zine' is
short for either 'fanzine' or 'magazine', depending on your
point of view. Zines ar