Sniffin’ Glue – The Bible
As Sniffin’ Glue The Bible shows, there are no airs and graces to the first punk fanzine. It is what it is which is various events in the unfolding punk rock story captured at various times in the issues with the angst, honesty and passionate voice of Mark P and later Danny Baker along with photos by Erica Echenberg, Jill Furmanovsky and Harry Murlovski.
Starting off with a circulation of 50, by the time it moved to Dryden Chambers where Miles Copeland and Step Forward were situated and above him Malcolm McLaren and Glitterbest, it was touching 15,000 and in danger of becoming just like other mags beholden to advertisers and such.
Sniffin’ Glue – The Bible was the first of the collations of the various issues and raised some eyebrows at the time as it all felt very weird in 1978 having a year of punk handily packaged up into a coffee table format book of the seminal fanzine that ended the year before. But for Mark P it was a demarcation and his move to being Mark Perry in ATV the band.
The Big O certainly waded full on into punk publishing 3 books at the same time in April 1978 Sniffin’ Glue, PUNK! Not Another Punk Book and 100 Nights At The Roxy.
Some eyebrows were raised when this glossy coffee table publication appeared in 1978 and Burchill & Parsons with customary venom gave their take on it.
Perry sold his Airfix-eroded integrity for £500 by flogging the rights of the Sniffin’ Glue Brittannica to the ancient manager of Gaye’s Adverts, who published them as a £2 paperback, The Best Of Sniffin’# Glue. It thereby joined the ranks of the long line of ex-punk-ploitation books, all written under sweat-shop, slave-labor condiions by the wretched Fan-scenes. The Boy Looked At Johnny
Mioaow!!! That’s about 5 puns and low blows in just one paragraph!
There are later collations that have commentary from Mark and the recommendation is to get those as they tell the backstory to the issues, what was happening, and what Mark felt.
SNIFFIN’ GLUE may have been the closest thing to perfection ever achieved by a magazine. Untroubled by the demands of owners, publishers, designers and production editors, it was a one-man enterprise that perfectly mirrored the spirit and manners of its subject matter – punk rock – by being intentionally amateurish, passionate and crude.
Mark Perry’s first issue (1 of 12) set the tone for an exercise in kitchen-table publishing that did not even have a kitchen table. Boldly scrawled in his bedroom SNIFFIN’ GLUE started out as a fan’s rallying cry, went on just as long as it needed to (one year) and then stopped, as good punk enterprises should.
Its twelve issues were surely meant to be disposable, the polar opposite of those glossy lifestyle magazines that some people like to collect and file away. Who was going to treasure Perry’s startlingly crude graphic fanzine? Yet today, when any amateur can run up a professional-looking publication on a computer, SNIFFIN’ GLUE looks somehow even more heroic. Blurb from latest collation 2024
TalkPunk
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