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Physical: Antiquated Future PO Box 42081 Portland, Oregon 97242 USA
Antiquated Future is an online store, zine distro, pop-up shop, and label that began in 2008 out of Olympia, Washington and currently operates out of Portland, Oregon. Over the past sixteen years, we've distributed several thousand different zines, books, cassettes, records, and handmade odds and ends by independent artists. Though we've grown over the years—and even gone through a name change (originally we were the Ms. Valerie Park Distro)—we've been essentially the same since the beginning: we spread print and physical mediums through digital avenues, employing the future to preserve the past.
Daily operations are mostly run by Joshua James Amberson and Novie Nimble (Tape Witch). For many years, Chask’e Lindgren co-ran operations and continues to occasionally design our fliers and shirts. Evan Hashi does our website design and technical upkeep. Rachel Lee-Carman does illustration work for the site and our stickers. Gina Sarti solicits new zines and long oversaw our Instagram account. Katie Savastano is the artist behind our header lettering. Deth P. Sun designed our newest sticker and logo. On the label end, Andrew Barton helps with curation and design of our Selected Songs series, in addition to other non-series titles, and Fred Thomas does mastering for many of our releases. And a TON of other friends and collaborators have helped us table at events over the years.
A zine (pron.: /ˈziːn/ Zeen; an abbreviation of fanzine, or magazine) is a self-published, small-circulation booklet or mini-magazine, usually produced by one person or a few individuals. Zines come in all shapes, sizes, topics, and formats. They can include personal essays, political discussions, fiction, craft, or do-it-yourself advice. Articles or reviews about music, movies, comics, and poetry, are also common. In short: they can be anything! "Zine distros" are simply distributors of zines. They act as an avenue for helping other people's zines reach different audiences than they might otherwise reach.
We try to carry a really wide range of zines, while still maintaining a curated selection. Personal, historical, music, humor, personal-as-political, literary, how-to, and pop culture are all zine genres we find ourselves especially drawn to. We also try to carry a range of zines in terms of cost and production quality—both simply designed, affordable zines (that nod to the '90s zine heyday we came up in) and high production value, art-focused zines and workbook zines that reflect where people have taken the zine format in recent years.
Being one of the largest zine distros in the country, we try to recognize that responsibility by not specializing too much. Many of our customers have never bought, or even heard of, a zine before and we hope to offer a lot of entry points into falling in love with zines.
Click on the Add to Cart button next to each item you want to order, then click on your shopping cart (which is located in the top right hand corner), and select where you want the order shipped to. Our cart goes through Snipcart, which accepts PayPal and all major debit and credit cards. Questions about other forms of payment can be found in the Mail Order section below.
We ship all orders out within 1-3 days. Most weeks, we send shipments at least 3 times per week. Depending on the order, our shipping costs cover First Class, Ground Advantage, Priority, and Media Mail shipping within the U.S. All orders outside the U.S. ship standard International First Class.
Shipping times will vary, depending on your distance from Portland, Oregon. Orders within the U.S. typically take between 2-7 days after being shipped to arrive. International orders typically take between 1-6 weeks for delivery. If you're looking for U.S. Priority Shipping options, please contact us first.
Vaguely, yes. If you're familiar with our selection and feel like your work would be a good fit, you're welcome to send a sample copy to the PO box above. We require a sample copy simply because it's hard to get a good sense of a publication without seeing it physically. Please note: Due to our busy schedule and the sheer volume of submissions we receive (hundreds and hundreds each year!), we will only respond if we decide to pick your submission up and our turnaround time is roughly 3-12 months. We consider largely consider zines, but also chapbooks, micro-press books, literary journals, cassette tapes, LPs, handmade paper goods, and assorted ephemera. When submitting, please mention your item's wholesale and retail prices, how you found us, and what items/kind of items from our catalog you feel your work is akin to.
Note that if we pick up your work, we sell to brick-and-mortar stores around the U.S. and sometimes internationally, as well as all manner of libraries (public, academic, zine-based, community, free libraries, etc). We try to get each person's work out into the world as much as we can, though we know for some this isn't the goal and they like to have more control over where their work ends up. If this is you, we may not be the best fit.
Though we have releases planned deep into the foreseeable future, we're always willing to take a listen. Some things to take note of before emailing us, though: like many small labels, we don't make money. At best, we break even. So, we're really looking for a relationship more than a business transaction. Given that, please include with your submission: how you found our label, which of our releases you're excited about, and how you see your music being in conversation with that music.
Shipping is a tricky one—with so many items, there are thousands of possible shipping-price combinations. But, after 15 years (and despite innumerable USPS price hikes), we've fine-tuned our site's shipping calculator so most orders are pretty close to their actual shipping cost. One thing to know: our U.S. shipping costs top out at $10. That means you can order as much as you'd like and the shipping will never go higher than $10!
Note that we now send single zine orders using USPS Flat Rate rather than USPS Letter Rate. Since we send hundreds of single zine orders each year, we made this change to avoid the many issues that more commonly arise with Letter Rate (lost orders, bent orders, etc). This just means that a single zine now ships for around $2-3 rather than $1+. While Flat Rate is scanned through the postal system, they don't have a true tracking number like a package. If you need a tracking number for a single-zine order, contact us and we'll send a PayPal invoice for the additional funds to bring it up to package rate (which starts around $5, depending on the item's weight and your proximity to Portland).
International costs were raised considerably by USPS in recent years, which is largely why our international shipping prices are so expensive. We don't want it to be that way! But that's truly how much it costs these days (and we're as mad about it as you are). To keep costs down when ordering internationally, avoid packs, grab bags, as well as zines and books with high page counts. If you're ordering cassettes, note that 2-3 cassettes ship for the same price as 1 cassette, and our shipping calculator takes this into account. Do reach out if you need help with this or have particular questions or requests.
Send us a message with your order info and we can try and troubleshoot. If it just doesn't seem like it's going to arrive, we're happy to discuss resending or refunding your order.
While we're generally very easy-going about such things, we may ask you to wait a little longer to see if your initial order is just arriving late due to postal delays (especially if you're ordering from outside the U.S. where arrival times fluctuate wildly). Also note that if you provided an incorrect shipping address, we don't offer refunds but we can discuss resending if the package is returned to us.
Yes! Just email us (to the address at the top of this page) with a list of what you're interested in and desired quantities, and we'll let you know what we can fulfill and their wholesale prices. Easy! After the first order, we offer a NET30 payment option to those who need it.
(If you're a customer looking for a store in your region that carries Antiquated Future goods, look at the list of stores that we work with on our links page.)
We love them. We're big library supporters. If you contact us ahead of time, we're happy to waive shipping costs on any domestic library order. (We'll send you a free shipping coupon code, so you can keep it within the cart system and won't require a separate invoice or anything that might not fit easily with library purchasing restrictions.) If you're ordering multiple copies of many different titles, we just ask that you email us ahead of time so that we can check our stock before you place your order.
We know some of us still yearn for the era of distro catalogs that you send away for in the mail. Sadly, these days it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for us to solely do it that way, but it doesn't mean we don't do it! Within the U.S. you can send well-concealed cash or check (payable to Antiquated Future) to the address at the top of this page with a list of what you want and money for shipping (which you can calculate using the shopping cart on the site) and those things will be on their way as soon as we get your letter and your check clears.
Yes! While we don't have it set up as an option in our shopping cart, you're welcome to pay us through Venmo (@antiquatedfuture). Just email us a screenshot of your cart or a list, let us know you'll be paying up through Venmo, and we'll ship it out!
All of our vintage cassette tape grab bags are now solely on our Etsy page! We tried to manage both, but since our stock changes near-daily on Etsy we needed to more closely manage available inventory. If you're using store credit or gift certificates, though, you can include tape grab bags alongside items on the site.
We do! Several times a year we make our way to an event and set-up shop. We now help run Grover's Curiosity Shop here in Portland, where some items from our catalog permanently adorn the shelves and we occasionally do zine, cassette, or VHS-focused pop-up sales. You can find us at the Portland Zine Symposium each year, but due to our chronic health conditions and aging pets, we are no longer consistent with any other fests or events. Contact us if you're curious where we'll be next, or have an event you'd like us to come to or think we'd be interested in.
If you like what we do and want to see it keep going (but don't want to own more stuff), you can send us funds via Venmo (@antiquatedfuture) or PayPal (antiquatedfuture[at]gmail[dot]com), or you can send a check to the address at the top of the page.
These funds help support the artists we work with and help fund the donations we give throughout each year. Currently, we have several fundraisers going, often supporting the medical care expenses of artists we work with (and their animal friends), as well as community-based advocacy groups. We donate weekly to Gaza relief organizations, giving a percentage of our sales through Grover's Curiosity Shop each Thursday.
We just wrapped up our Free Zine Care Package project after four years (March 2020-June 2024)—sending over a thousand zines to folks who were struggling during that time period.