About the Cafe:

Cafe Compendium is the e-zine repository of excerpts from the print zine Ladies' Fetish & Taboo Society Compendium of Urban Anthropology, a footnote and detail-heavy running commentary on the weirdness and complications of modern life. The print zine runs about 16 pages, is published whenever, roughly quarterly, and has an editorial policy that is entirely whim-based.

A four issue subscription costs $10. Sample copies are $3.00 ($6.00 for double issues). Make payment payable to Kathy Biehl and send it to:
P.O. Box 184
Oak Ridge, NJ 07438

The Houston Press named the Compendium Houston's Best Local Zine for 1996. Electric FactSheet Five singled it out as an Editor's Choice in March '95. Pagan Kennedy described it in the Voice Literary Supplement: "Try being a single, straight woman navigating a Bermuda Triangle of bad dates, unhinged friends, and encounters with minor celebrities.... The zine will convince you that we're all controlled by perverse universal forces.") Penn Jillette said, "I liked your mag, but if you printed pictures of naked women in it, I would have looked at it longer."

I don't.

For more information about the zine, write fortuna@pipeline.com.

Info about Back issues!

My name is Kathy Biehl. I have been writing since grade school and as early as 1967 scribbled out prototypes of what are now called zines. I've been writing the Compendium since 1988 as an alternative to keeping a diary, or to therapy. Instead of my paying a trained professional to listen to tales of of the unbelievable things that regularly and really happen, complete strangers pay me for the privilege of reading about them. And, in response, send in some of the best letters in zinedom. (Forewarned is forearmed: All correspondence is treated as submitted for publication!)

My writing also appears in perfectly normal, mainstream publications like Diversion andMy Table (and a few not-quite-so-mainstream journals.) As for me, I'm also a lawyer; a singer; an actress and Margarent Dumont impersonator; and an astrologer and Tarot reader.

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