ABOUT

About me

Hello! My name is Ivone, and i live in the suburbs of Porto city, in the north of Portugal.
For anyone who might not know much about my country, let me tell you a little about it...
Portugal is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. It's the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east. The Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira are also part of Portugal.

I must confess I am fairly “new” to zines, i've been an avid reader & collector for almost a year now. Although, I read my first zine about 15 years ago! Thanks to the powers of the Internets, I 'm now certain of the name of that zine - it was a punk zine called «Profane Existence», issue 28/Spring 1996 (btw, this project is still active, can you believe it? Awesome!!). But continuing my zine curriculum – after that first zine, I still wasn't a zine lover, since I wasn't into punk (I just hanged out with friends who were punks). Unfortunately, we didn't have internet back then and it wasn't easy for me to find zines. I bought a couple of Portuguese goth fanzines the following years, and about 2 years later I got some other Portuguese zines about comics and alternative fashion and other random stuff. After moving from what was my house for 20 year, I lost track of where some of these zine are, much to my dismay. About the same time I moved, a friend I had made recently, was starting to make his own zine, he even invited me to collaborate but I wasn't feeling inspired and didn't think I had anything worth to say to the world. He put out about 4 or 6 issues and then called it quits.

So for the most of my time I “just” read books. Lots and lots of books; i've lost count of the amount of books i've read (and reread) over almost 25 years. I love the feeling of entering a bookstore and looking at all those shelves, thousands of books all lined up, just waiting for someone to pick them. In the 2000s the major bookstore chains started hitting everywhere in Portugal, giving us an illusion that there was a wider variety of books available than ever before. Unfortunately, this would sometimes lead to overpricing of books, specially if they were “foreign” books, hardbacks or (from my experience) art books or graphic novels, so I slowly drove away from buying in those places. I've bought great books there, I'm not gonna lie, but I've also bought cool books at used/out of catalog bookstores and I loved it!

I had been thinking about opening my own small bookstore, but unfortunately I still haven't won the lottery and don't have financial stability to do that. Maybe later, who knows? But I didn't want to give up my dream of selling books and zines just like that, so I thought to myself – why not start a mail-order catalog, a zine distro? - and here I am now.

Why the name Invicta Distro?

Porto is also called "Cidade Invicta" (English: Unvanquished City) after resisting the Miguelist siege during the 19th century.

Though I've lived in the suburbs for all my 31 years of age, i've always loved Porto city and used to catch the bus to hang out with mt friends during high-school. After high-school, Porto became the main place to meet up with friends from other neighbor suburbs, and even friends out of town, so I have a lot of good memories from it. Lots of afternoons sitting at a coffee tables, walking around the streets and hanging out with my punk friends, live gigs matinees, late night partying at the Ribeira, near the riverside.

Good and bad memories, but nevertheless I wanted to pay homage to the city and since calling it Porto Distro didn't sound very good, I went for “Invicta”. If you think of the meaning of the word itself – in English, “unvanquished” – it means victorious, undefeated in battle. And that's what I want for my new project – to win this battle –, which I know will be a hard task at the beginning, but I will fight and do my best to keep it up and running well!