Got my hands on All Hands On the other night, sent by The 2nd Hand man himself, Todd Dills. Todd's been churning out The 2nd Hand broadsheet for 10 years now in three or four different cities, mostly Chicago and now Nashville.
All Hands On: The 2nd Hand After 10 is the anthology chronicling some of the best The 2nd Hand has to offer, styled in its classic zine-meets-urgent-pamphlet style. Dills financed much of it through a Kickstarter project, so there you go.
It's put together super nice with portraits of the included writers. Speaking of, there are some dandy writers and a lot of these reflect a Chicago bent. Let's try on Joe Meno first, one of my favorite writers and known for Hairstyles of The Damned and The Great Perhaps among other books. His story, “In The Avenues of Airplanes and Paper” broke me with its unusual take (“air quotes”) and then the surprising character settings. That guy can write.
Then let's flip and there's Al Burian, which also broke me, because his column was one of my faves in Punk Planet (RIP), then there's the whole Milemarker band thing and here he is again, I need to look up and find his stuff more often. His story is “Zangara” which I'm just now looking at, something about Miami and Florida and hospitals; looks good.
Other writers include Patrick Somerville, Jill Summers, Mickey Hess, Tobias Carroll, Jonathan Messinger, Susannah Felts and of course Todd himself. Some of the selected entries include memories and footnotes about readings, composition, presentation, so you get a real for the writer's work and process…something most books should do anyway.
I've only scratched this book a little bit, look forward to diving more into, swimming all in The 2nd Hand.
Here's The 2nd Hand site for more solid works and here's a link to buy the book.
