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Add Toner: A Cometbus Collection
Add Toner brings together classic, out of print issues of Cometbus magazine, including 'Lanky' (a novella), 'Back to the Land' (an oral history of the children of hippie homesteaders) plus sixty other interviews and short stories. The text is lovingly handwritten, interspersed with bold graphics and illustrations. Includes never-before-published material.
Add Toner is the follow-up to Despite Everything, the best-of collection from the first two decades of Cometbus, called "a classic in the subterranean world" by Time, and "the best loved zine ever" by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Add Toner is the follow-up to Despite Everything, the best-of collection from the first two decades of Cometbus, called "a classic in the subterranean world" by Time, and "the best loved zine ever" by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
- GenresNonfiction
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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161 people want to read
About the author
Aaron Cometbus
47 books165 followersAaron Elliott, better known as Aaron Cometbus, is a drummer, lyricist, self-described "punk anthropologist" and author of Cometbus, a seminal punk rock zine.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 3, 2018
A blinders-off and somehow irreverent love letter to the parts of the recent-past berkeley that I miss so much, and to parts that I never knew but feel like I did. Insightful and hilarious; probably less punk than the early zines. Borrow this from me.
February 21, 2019
A great culture/historical perspective of groups doing it on their own. It pertains to owning a business together. Being an individual, to the extreme fringe ends...including drugs, drinking, and random encounters with the world. To living with nature and the experiences that come with them. The entire book is set-up interview style; the author interviewing people from each of these walks of life.
June 15, 2025
Man, reading the Cometbus collections has been such a transformative experience. I maybe connected with this book 5% less than "Despite Everything" but still loved living vicariously through the perspective of a 90s East Bay punk.
May 16, 2018
Insightful and enjoyable.
March 29, 2019
Peak Cometbus. Both Lanky and Back to the Land are among the greatest things Aaron has ever written.
January 17, 2015
I've only read excerpts from the previous Cometbus anthology "Despite Everything" (there's a generous preview on Google Books), but from what I can tell "Add Toner" is rather a different beast. The earlier collection includes a bunch of different voices (though always collated and overseen by the industrious Aaron Cometbus) and employs sort of a shotgun strategy, experimenting with tons of different formats, graphic styles, and so on. This volume is dominated by a few longer pieces and is completely the work of Cometbus. The result is more staid, reflective, in a word: adult. It's a more focused but at times less energetic read. The longer page counts allow Cometbus to dive deeply into the undersung subjects of his engaging interview issues.
On the other hand, when the writing turns to a narrative mode in the novella-length memoir "Lanky," which takes up the middle stretch of the book, things start to sag. That's not for lack of interesting subject matter--Cometbus has truly led a colorful life, one which has provided him with tons of good material. On the other hand, this longer piece exposes some weaknesses of that familiar zine prose style that nibbles an elliptical path through the story, from the edge to the center, then starting at the edge again. The crisp hand-lettered pages and the neatly headed micro-chapters belie how much meandering the story does. In short bursts, this rambling eye gives the writing a poignancy, like listening to a shared secret, a quality that the best personal 'zine work shares with all great punk songs. But like punk, it's better at a sprint than a walk.
The double handful of short pieces that bookend "Add Toner" are, to me, proof of this principle. The sense summoned in these vignettes, of a writer in the stream of life, trying to make sense of things even as they pass him by, reminded me of Cindy Crabbe's great "Doris." But as with that collection, Cometbus's work suffers the more you read at once, because that searing impression begins to drown in the details and the writing loses its diary-like immediacy. There seems to be a resistance in these ad-hoc zine forms to lay down a superstructure, to try and build a sustained history out of collected incident and impression. The less satisfying parts of "Add Toner" might point to the wisdom of that comittment.
On the other hand, when the writing turns to a narrative mode in the novella-length memoir "Lanky," which takes up the middle stretch of the book, things start to sag. That's not for lack of interesting subject matter--Cometbus has truly led a colorful life, one which has provided him with tons of good material. On the other hand, this longer piece exposes some weaknesses of that familiar zine prose style that nibbles an elliptical path through the story, from the edge to the center, then starting at the edge again. The crisp hand-lettered pages and the neatly headed micro-chapters belie how much meandering the story does. In short bursts, this rambling eye gives the writing a poignancy, like listening to a shared secret, a quality that the best personal 'zine work shares with all great punk songs. But like punk, it's better at a sprint than a walk.
The double handful of short pieces that bookend "Add Toner" are, to me, proof of this principle. The sense summoned in these vignettes, of a writer in the stream of life, trying to make sense of things even as they pass him by, reminded me of Cindy Crabbe's great "Doris." But as with that collection, Cometbus's work suffers the more you read at once, because that searing impression begins to drown in the details and the writing loses its diary-like immediacy. There seems to be a resistance in these ad-hoc zine forms to lay down a superstructure, to try and build a sustained history out of collected incident and impression. The less satisfying parts of "Add Toner" might point to the wisdom of that comittment.
December 17, 2015
I judge books by the cover, by the feel . . . the initial sense of whether I might be interested. or not. "Add Toner "certainly let its cover attract me, let alone that it sat on the bookshop shelf along side the author's more DIY productions - that is, the Cometbus "zines". "Zines" in a bookshop? On a regular shelf? Not regulated to an impenetrable mass of neglected media somewhere in the back of the store?
Sure, there was something there, let alone that one of the cover blurbs stated "a legend in self-publishing". Clearly. Yet I had never heard of him. The design itself distinguished "Add Toner" from every other book and immediately indicated the author's independence and self-sufficiency.
The loud and clear ethos of "Add Toner" originates in the nebulous category of "Punk", which (as a upstart musical form) was accompanied by a burgeoning "zine" contingent. Cometbus, in the course of his writings, tries to elucidate what this is, or what it means as a "way of life", which is pretty much solely of his and his friends making (that is, DIY) rather than a well-articulated and followable credo. So one can take or leave it, but while "Punk" is the underpinning, it is exactly the testimony and documentation of Cometbus' outer and inner circle that playfully connects him to other dissident and alternative inclinations. And it is his unique style, his "voice", that lends the whole production the veneer of a "literary adventure".
The action is situated in America, and Cometbus moves here and there in that specific landscape, but the narrative is self-reflective, the material from his life, as he spells out his friendships, romantic relationships, his jobs, workplace interactions, his obsessive zine-making, the short-comings and outstanding qualities of various mentors, the personality's of his friend's parents and all those people he encounters on the street, on public transportation, in 24 hour coffee shops.
Of particular interest was the included novella "Lanky" (many of the other selection are a kind of non-fiction), supposedly some kind of memoir of a former girlfriend but more often than not short interspersed slices of his life that include all of what is listed above. The action of that novella is also situated in Berkeley, California, which it catches us up on that city's alternative histories, down there, on Telegraph Avenue.
Sure, there was something there, let alone that one of the cover blurbs stated "a legend in self-publishing". Clearly. Yet I had never heard of him. The design itself distinguished "Add Toner" from every other book and immediately indicated the author's independence and self-sufficiency.
The loud and clear ethos of "Add Toner" originates in the nebulous category of "Punk", which (as a upstart musical form) was accompanied by a burgeoning "zine" contingent. Cometbus, in the course of his writings, tries to elucidate what this is, or what it means as a "way of life", which is pretty much solely of his and his friends making (that is, DIY) rather than a well-articulated and followable credo. So one can take or leave it, but while "Punk" is the underpinning, it is exactly the testimony and documentation of Cometbus' outer and inner circle that playfully connects him to other dissident and alternative inclinations. And it is his unique style, his "voice", that lends the whole production the veneer of a "literary adventure".
The action is situated in America, and Cometbus moves here and there in that specific landscape, but the narrative is self-reflective, the material from his life, as he spells out his friendships, romantic relationships, his jobs, workplace interactions, his obsessive zine-making, the short-comings and outstanding qualities of various mentors, the personality's of his friend's parents and all those people he encounters on the street, on public transportation, in 24 hour coffee shops.
Of particular interest was the included novella "Lanky" (many of the other selection are a kind of non-fiction), supposedly some kind of memoir of a former girlfriend but more often than not short interspersed slices of his life that include all of what is listed above. The action of that novella is also situated in Berkeley, California, which it catches us up on that city's alternative histories, down there, on Telegraph Avenue.
January 30, 2017
Really enjoyed this quite a bit, and not quite for the reasons I expected. There's not a lot about punk music but tons about punk as an ethos, and related questions about community, including the tentative balance between rejection and inclusivity that defined punk for me growing up. Sad I missed this at age 16.
July 30, 2015
Better than Despite Everything, to me. There was more of his beautiful, funny, thought-provoking writing <3
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews