Almanac is a collectively told oral history of 8-Ball Community, an organization of people who seek to nurture a community of art through the creation and maintenance of free and accessible platforms of expression. 8-Ball Almanac acts as both a retrospective of the decade since the community’s accidental conception in a Brooklyn pool hall in 2012 and a guidebook for those who wish to cultivate a community like this one. In the years since the first 8-Ball Zine Fair, the 8-Ball Community has grown beyond anything the founders had conceived of in 2012. Its scope broadened from organizing events and selling zines to archiving the physical evidence of the subculture they represented, broadcasting radio and television, and political activism. In keeping with 8-Ball Community’s tenets of collectivism and non-hierarchy, the story told in 8-Ball Almanac is from the perspective of more than 100 people who have been involved over the past decade. Interviewed about their time with 8-Ball and edited by members of the community, their conversations are accompanied by hundreds of photos and scans of ephemera taken over 8-Ball’s history.
