Enjoyed this piece in The Yale Review about Cavafy, but I feel like it focuses too much on his life and not enough on the details of how he distributed his work:

CAVAFY’S APPROACH TO PUBLICATION was highly unusual. Although his poems appeared in periodicals, he never published a conventional commercial book. Instead, he had his poems printed individually and gave them to friends as loose broadsheets. In 1904, he selected fourteen poems to be printed in a run of one hundred copies. In 1910, he produced another bound edition of twenty-one poems with a run of two hundred copies. After this, he reverted to distributing his broadsheets by hand in ad hoc collections. The broadsheets were stacked in an “improvised ‘bindery’” or “scriptorium” in his apartment, where he would prepare selections particular to the recipient. Through this oddly private mode of publication, he ultimately distributed at least twenty-two hundred handbound collections of his poetry.

Think how wild this is! Surely Cavafy is the most important 20th century poet to publish primarily in zine form.

(Although actually as I say that I realize it’s not true because Soviet-era samizdat writers also basically utilized a similar form of publication).