Operation Phoenix Records compiles a big pile of out-of-print punk zines online. In a related story, my free time is gone...

If you’re anything like me, you have boxes of old punk zines shoved away somewhere. Just last night I threw out a box of old Maximumrocknrolls and Flipsides that were sitting in my basement. It was heart wrenching, but they smelled a little moldy, and I didn’t want to deal with the toxins I might be exposed to while rereading their old newsprint pages. So they went to the curb.

I don’t have the space to store them anyway. But what if, in our digital era, somebody started to compile them online, scanning and loading them as PDFs. That’d be a good thing, right? But who has the time?

Fortunately, one person has made the time.

The folks (Folk? Person?) at Operation Phoenix Records has taken on the colossal project of compiling out of print punk zines, scanning them, and putting them up online.

Currently, there are a bunch of old issues of Maximumrocknroll, Flipside, Suburban Voice, and HeartattaCk, with a ton more on the way. There are also some links to transcripts of band interviews and old columns from Maximumrocknroll, including You’re Wrong! , Mykel Board’s column, which is one of the first things I read when I get my issue each month.

It’s a great resource to have just a mouse click away, rather than having to worry about finding a safe place to stack all that old newsprint where it won’t get damp and moldy or cause a fire hazard. You also don’t need to shell out a ton of money to read old interviews with your favorite bands.

Check out Operation Phoenix Records zine archive here. While you’re there, you can either donate to help the cause of compiling these archives, or visit their online store and purchase a few classic punk records. Either way, they make some money and it helps them put together this archive.

Image courtesy of MRR; and while MetaFilter posted this link today, for the record, I mentioned it here last year. I'm just pointing it out again.