Listening, looking, and loving the COMPRESSED Zine and Music Fair in San Diego

Features Jake Zawlacki | September 30, 2026 The floor of the zine show. All photos taken by Jake Zawlacki. I love zine shows. They’re casual in approach but serious in their messaging, welcoming to an almost militant degree, and they always have something you’ve never looked for but had to grab. Last year, I covered the San Diego Zine Fest and had a blast picking up zines of all kinds, checking out the exhibits at The Woo, and getting a sweet screen printed T. This year, I headed to Bread and Salt to look at what COMPRESSED had in store, a zine and music fair celebrating DIY culture in the greater San Diego and Tijuana region. The Compressed table The Burn All Books/Scanners table The show is a joint effort by San Diego’s particle.fm, a “DIY community internet radio station” playing excellent music of all forms and contents, and Burn All Books/SCANNNERS Archive, a “risograph publisher, distro, and studio” that is as cool as it sounds. Setting the Do-It-Yourself ethos as a larger umbrella for the varying mediums of music, comics, art, literature, and everything in between means you get stuff that might have fallen through the cracks or defies simple categorization, like hand-printed...