Ink: Do It Yourself, Baby

Nick Paumgarten

I old and pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic, because he wanted both to be a radio engineer and to avoid having to read or write in school. But, as an obsessed and information-starved fan of a bunch of then underappreciated British rock bands, he got the itch to launch a fanzine. His father, an old lefty, had a mimeograph machine at the family’s Upper West Side apartment, and Robbins and some friends used it to produce about three hundred copies, twenty-four hand-stapled pages each, of a publication he christened Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press, after a 1968 song by the Bonzo Dog Band: “Do the trouser press, baby!” They hawked them outside a Rory Gallagher show at the Academy of Music, for a quarter a pop. With their…

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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 22, 2024

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