A friend, Jarek Zola, and I have created an art zine that centers around retrocomputing, vintage electronics, and mid-century electromechanical devices titled The Basement.
You can download the free (CC BY-NC-ND) PDF of The Basement at Lost Bits, and the high-resolution original images are on Jarek’s photo gallery.
Our hope is that this zine will entertain and inform; we poured a lot of passion into the project. From the un-staged capture of the equipment itself on vintage photography equipment through hand-processing of the negatives in Jarek’s photo lab, and then again working through digital layout using classic typesetting tools like TeX along with carefully selected fonts and detail-oriented layout, it was an exciting and unusual journey for me. Jarek has a true artist’s soul, and the things he captured in his lens are even more evocative than the beautiful industrial design of the objects themselves. We tried to provide something here for everyone; the artwork itself, a little bit of history and flavor, careful layout and design, and a price tag of only the time it takes you to read it.
Enjoy!