The Chicago Underground Library (CUL) is a collection focusing on material produced by small presses or independent publishers in the Chicago area. The collection includes zines, comics, perfect-bound novels, chapbooks, newsletters, art books, magazines and pamphlets, with an emphasis on inclusivity and blurring format and genre lines. CUL was developed by Nell Taylor and Emerson Dameron. Chicago (officially named the City of Chicago) is the third largest city in the United States (after New York City and Los Angeles), with an official population of 2,896,016, as of the 2000 census. ... This article or section should be merged with Zine This article needs cleanup. ... Comics (or, less commonly, sequential art) is a form of visual art consisting of images which are commonly combined with text, often in the form of speech balloons or image captions. ... A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ... Chapbook is a generic term to cover a particular genre of pocket-sized booklet, popular from the sixteenth through to the later part of the nineteenth century. ... A newsletter is a regularly distributed publication generally about one main topic that is of interest to its subscribers. ... This article is about the magazine as a published medium. ... A pamphlet is an unbound booklet (that is, without a hard cover or binding). ...

CUL is among a number of organizations formed to house materials which are frequently excluded from library shelves, such as The Denver Zine Library, the Chicago Great Lakes Underground Press Collection at DePaul University, and the Salt Lake City Public Library's zine collection. But the CUL collection is defined more by location than by any format or subculture. DePaul University should not be confused with DePauw University. ... The Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Salt Lake Citys top tourist draw. ... As understood in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a set of people with a distinct set of behavior and beliefs that differentiate them from a larger culture of which they are a part. ...

Sources

• [official site]
• [Denver Zine Library]
• List of zines