Future Fantasteek! No.23 Special Collaborative Issue is now on show at Tutt Library, Colorado College, USA from July to September 2025.
You Love Libraries (double-sided with) When All the Books Are Gone is a 32-page collaborative zine by Jac Batey (UK artist) and Jessy Randall (USA poet).
Brighton, UK / Colorado Springs, USA (2025)
297mm x 210mm, 32 x pages, Tête-bêche format
Digital colour printing on 150 gsm recycled silk paper,
Includes a bookmark, Limited edition of 100
Future Fantasteek! is now on exhibition in the Bower Ashton Library, Bristol, UK
Wednesday 5th November – Friday 19th December 2025
An exhibition hosted by Bower Ashton Library, Bristol, UK
https://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/ff23libraries/
This special library-themed issue of Future Fantasteek! (ISSN 2399-3022) It is a gift in gratitude for all that libraries and library staff do for communities, for literacy, and for intellectual freedom. It contains two 16-line poems about books and libraries by Jessy Randall, illustrated by Jac Batey using withdrawn library books, vintage stationery, tippex, index cards, pens, and collages. The Tête-bêche format means both zines are bound together with one rotated 180 degrees, making two front covers.
Both authors have an extended network of contacts with international libraries and a track record of publishing zines and independent press. As the political landscape in the UK and USA is changing, we want to be able to gift a positive free publication that celebrates libraries and can be shared, swapped, and archived within them.
Future Fantasteek! began in 2006. It’s in collections including Tate Britain, V&A Library, British Library, Getty Institute, Yale Collection of British Art, and the Minnesota Centre for the Book. In 2012, the first ten issues were part of a touring exhibition in the UK and the USA.
The authors thank the University of Portsmouth, UK, Research & Innovation Fund, for supporting the printing and distribution of this publication. We love libraries – for real, not just if someone asks
Jessy Randall (USA) is the author of the poetry collections, including Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (Penguin Random House, 2022), How to Tell If You Are Human: Diagram Poems (Pleiades Press, 2018) and a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.
Jessy Randall’s website
The images below show the work-in-progress collage/artwork for both poems
Pale Ire Press 