How and Why to Run a Book and Zine Swap

this text is also available as a digital or print zine!

Introduction:

In summers 2025 and 2026, Dick’s Lending Library and Sheer Spite Press have co-organized a book and zine swap in Parc Lafontaine in Montreal. Both years, it’s been an extremely chill and pleasant event. I hope we’ll keep doing it, and I also hope that other people organize similar events! To that end, I thought I’d write up some notes about organizing the swap, with the intention of making it easy for other people to replicate. Our event is focused around queer and trans people because that’s who we are, but yours could be more general, or focused on a different identity or affinity group. Likewise, most of the same principles would apply for swaps centred around other types of items.

Why organize a swap?

It’s nice to hang out in the park with people: something I love about Montreal culture is that parks are so full of people in the summers, hanging out in all kinds of ways. It is really lovely that it is such a viable option for people to spend time together in free outdoor spaces, not just in our homes or in businesses.
It’s an event that people can interact with in a bunch of different ways: some people stop by briefly and some stay for the full time. Some people come with their friends and hang out together. Some people come alone and meet new people, some people come alone and sit quietly and read on the periphery of the event.
It promotes sharing and reuse rather than buying and selling. In particular, even though I run a business that sells zines, I believe very strongly in maintaining a gift and trade economy as part of zine culture. I’m not opposed to buying or selling zines, but if it were the only way zines moved through the world, I would be a lot less interested in them. Zines are fun because they come with community (for more on this, check out my zine Making Friends With Zines)
It’s a pretty easy and cheap event to run! Basically you’re just laying out a couple blankets in the park. We probably spent about $20/year organizing it, but it would be totally feasible to do for $0.

Our event description, to help you write yours:

Join Dick’s and Sheer Spite for a book and zine swap! It will take place from 2-5 pm on Saturday, July 11, or at the same time on Sunday the 12th if it is raining on Saturday.

🎒 You can bring zines you have made yourself, or books and zines that you’re done reading! If you don’t have anything to trade, you’re still welcome to come pick up some new reading material. The books and zines you bring don’t need to be explicitly queer or trans, but nothing hateful please.

📍 We’ll be meeting in Parc Lafontaine, in the southeast corner of the park (near Sherbrooke and Papineau).

💜 Access info: We’ll be right next to a parking lot for anyone arriving by car. It is a relatively flat area of the park. It is four blocks uphill from Papineau metro, and directly accessible via the 24 and 45 buses. We don’t have plans for sign interpretation for this event.

😷 We ask that you wear a mask (we’ll bring masks if you need one!). If you know that you have, or have been exposed to, a contagious illness, please stay home and rest.

📚 We’ll sort the books and zines by genre and language to help you find things you’re interested in. At the end of the swap, books and zines that aren’t claimed will be added to the Dick’s collection where applicable, or donated.

The organizers:

Dick’s Lending Library is a community-run library that specializes in the literary, political, and artistic work of trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit authors. Sheer Spite Press is a small press and zine distro. In this case, the person (me) who runs Sheer Spite is also a member of the Dick’s Lending Library collective, so it is an easy “collaboration”. Having multiple organizers or promoters is nice (even if they in practice consist of the same group of people wearing different hats) because it gives you more networks by which to share and promote the event, making it likely more people will see it.

I also recommend passing your event along to other allied groups and organizations and asking them to share it with their networks as well, to help expand your reach beyond your immediate pals. Someone I chatted with at the last swap hadn’t heard of Dick’s OR Sheer Spite and it made me so happy they still found their way to the event!

In 2026, some of our friends were also organizing an intergenerational queer picnic. We had chatted about our respective events, but when we announced them around the same time, we were dismayed to realize that we had chosen the exact same time, in parks on opposite sides of the city. Fortunately, the picnic decided to move to the same park as us, and ended up holding their event a few metres away so that people could come back and forth between them. It was definitely a “the more the merrier” situation, and it made me wonder if there were other free park events we could collaborate with and run our events side-by-side: a clothes swap? a workshop?

Promotion:

Working with multiple groups is a great way to promote an event to a broader swath of people. I also always encourage people not to rely on social media as their sole way of sharing and promoting events. We know that social media is bad for us and bad for the world, and making it the main way that people find out about events makes it harder for people to leave social media even though we should. I recommend cultivating email lists for your projects, and also postering and flyering. Print out some quarter-letter-sized (four to a page) handbills and give them out to your friends and leave them around at bookstores and venues and stuff.

Choosing a location:

Both Dick’s and Sheer Spite organize a lot of events, sometimes separately, sometimes together. It’s always a lot of work booking an indoor venue and finding somewhere that is free or affordable, accessible, and available on a date that works for us. In comparison, despite the vagaries of weather, holding an event outside in a free public space seems so luxuriously easy! You probably won’t hit all of these points, but an ideal location for a swap would be:

Convenient for the organizers, since you’re the people most likely to be hauling a bunch of stuff there and back
Convenient for people who are likely to come to your swap
Near a landmark or intersection so that people aren’t wandering endlessly around a big park looking for you.
Easy to get to by public transit
Near a parking lot so that anyone who needs to arrive by car can do so
Not horrible for people using wheelchairs, rollators, or other mobility devices to reach
In the shade
Near public washrooms
Near a water fountain

Date and time:

We announce a date and a rain date at the same time. We make these a Saturday and Sunday on the same weekend. In 2025, we held the event on the rain date because the air quality was very bad on the first day, and better on the second. If both your first- and second-choice dates don’t end up working out, you can talk amongst yourselves about whether to try again or give up, depending on your capacity and schedules.
We hold the swap for 3 hours in the afternoon (2-5pm). This seems like a nice amount of time: not too short, not too long. Enough for a bunch of people to be able to cycle through, but not too onerous for us.
Organizers should expect to come half an hour before the event starts to set up, and stay half an hour after it ends to clean up.

Things you might want to bring:

Blankets or sheets, some to lay out the books on and some for people to sit on
Garden stakes (basically just long dowels or pieces of wood or bamboo, to attach the signs on to make them more stable and visible)
Paper to make signs: cardboard or bristol board is ideal, but whatever you have will also work! Ideally you’ll want signs to label the books, and also a sign of some kind to identify the event so people can find you.
Markers to write signs
Tape or stapler to attach signs to stakes
Scissors for sign-making
String to hang a banner or sign between trees
A cooler of drinks: snacks are nice, but drinks are more important. As summers become hotter and hotter, having something for people to drink is increasingly a safety and accessibility issue. Alternately, you can try and find somewhere to set up that is near a water fountain.
Folding table for information
Flyers with information about your group
Signup sheet your mailing list
Pens
Snacks if you want: like some fruit, or a bag of chips or package of cookies
Masks, if you want to make your event masks-required, masks-recommended, or just to make available an important community safety resource.
Sunscreen
First-aid kit, Narcan

The setup:

We made signs for different book sections, so that people could more easily categorize what they bring, and find books to pick up. These are the categories we used:

Fiction
Nonfiction
Poetry
Kids & YA
Comics & Graphic Novels
Hybrid/uncategorizeable
Zines & other (people also brought stickers, event flyers, pamphlets about causes and actions, & art prints)

Be welcoming:

Be attentive to new people arriving and greet them! Your book swap will probably attract shy people, introverts, and neurodivergent folks. Let them know they are in the right place, explain how the event works, introduce themselves, let them know they can ask you if they have any questions.
Explain the setup of the event (“if you brought books, you can put them down over here, we put up some signs for categories”)
Encourage people to take things! A lot of people have felt worried about taking books at the swaps, so it is useful to remind people that the books are there to be taken, we do not want to have to carry them home afterwards, please take them, yes, even if you didn’t bring anything
Invite people to chill on the park blankets, and offer them drinks if you’ve provided any. People might not know that the blankets and drinks are there for swap attendees, so an invitation goes a long way to making them feel welcome and in community!
Be ready to tell people about your organization if they are interested, but without cornering them or making them feel like you are trying to recruit them. Have a one-sentence explanation ready, and some printed materials they can take to learn more if they want.
Be nice about the books people bring! A lot of people are embarrassed about the books they bring, since they are almost always books they didn’t want anymore, not their faves! Let them know that someone will probably enjoy or be interested in them. Avoid making fun of any of the books you see because the person who brought them could be right behind you.

Cleanup:

Have a plan for what to do with the leftover books and zines! Here’s what we do:

Books and zines that meet the mandate of Dick’s Lending Library get added to our collection
Extra zines go into a free zine rack that Sheer Spite maintains at the studio they work out of
Extra books can go in little free libraries or get donated to books-to-prisons programs, other community groups that take book donations, or go in thrift store donation bins.

Other than that, not much cleanup has been required other than taking a couple of cans and papers to a recycling or garbage bin, and heading home to rest after a big day.