Back in print for the first time in a decade and a half, 48 years after it all began, this edition of the Sniffin’ Glue anthology includes a free glossy print: the cover of the prototypical punk fanzine’s ‘Christmas issue’, saucily retitled Sniffin’ Snow. If that doesn’t quite sate your desire for memorabilia, someone’s selling an original copy of that issue on AbeBooks for more than £4,000. Chancers are evergreen, of course, but it tells you something about the zine’s legacy that they’d think to try.

Sniffin’ Glue was initially devised, written, printed and distributed in July 1976, essentially a starstruck response by founding editor Mark Perry to the first UK gig by the Ramones. That first issue’s eight pages also includes an appraisal of arch hard rockers Blue Oyster Cult: the sort of thing Perry, and the co-writers who came on board for issue two onwards (this book’s back cover calls the zine “a one-man enterprise”, which is almost entirely inaccurate), would jettison as soon as there was enough of a British punk scene to profile.

Subsequent issues arrived roughly monthly for about a year and then stopped with something of a final flounce: the SG team, whose most prolific late-period writer Danny Baker launched a media career off its back, saw signs of punk being co-opted by the trad music biz and elected to extricate themselves. The last issue’s last article is an interview with Jimmy Pursey, slogan-spouting singer of Sham 69, which feels as good a pointer as any to the scene’s imminent trajectory.

Across the 14 issues that make up this compendium, SG’s production values rose only slightly as its print run hit 15,000 (more than many newsstand music mags circa 2024), with articles hacked out on typewriters and headlines scrawled in marker pen. The writing, in line with so many zines that followed in its wake, has that deathless part-time gonzo quality where grammar and punctuation are loosely applied, but in a way that suggests the scribe is aware of the rules he’s flouting. Plus, of course, these are men barely out of their teens in a “say something outrageous” environment, so the results can objectively be considered Problematic on occasion. The reason Sniffin’ Glue has endured as shorthand for a specific time and place in punk history is that it successfully made the things it was writing about sound really exciting.