First published in 1997, Notes from Underground treats zines as a serious form of cultural and political activity.

Duncombe traces their lineage through science-fiction fandom, punk, Riot Grrrl, personal zines and workplace confessionals, asking what happens when people create their own media outside professional publishing and the culture industry. Zines become small machines for turning alienation into identity, community and sometimes collective action. 

Duncombe is sympathetic to the promise of DIY culture without becoming its publicist. He examines the friction between authenticity and performance, rebellion and consumption, participatory culture and political effectiveness: whether building an alternative world is enough when the dominant one remains structurally intact. Interviews, illustrations and readings of actual zines keep the theory attached to the mess of production. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new afterword asking whether zines still matter after the internet absorbed many of their social functions—and what their slower, physical forms might still teach us about making culture rather than merely circulating it.

Microcosm Publishing, 2017. Third edition; twentieth-anniversary edition with new afterword. Paperback. Light cover wear and handling, with minor creasing to corners; internally clean.