Ben Scrimgeour spent a university year abroad in Marseille, from September 2020 to April 2021. The pandemic had cleared his diary, so he went out with a Canon EOS 500N and a pocket full of 35mm film several times a week. Marseille is the zine those walks produced: an A5 paperback, glue bound, with uncoated pages, released in September 2021. We printed it, photographed it that summer, and photographed it again in January 2026. Five years on, the copy on the table still has the warm, slightly sun faded glow of the city in it. So rather than tell the story in order, we will walk you round the object, part by part.
A fence, a sky and the city below it
The cover is one photograph doing two jobs. The top two thirds is pale blue sky with soft cloud, seen through a diamond pattern of chain link fence. The bottom third drops into dense rooftops and apartment blocks, with a frond of palm creeping in at the corner. MARSEILLE sits across the sky in black spaced capitals, and Ben's name is set small near the foot. That fence is a lovely device: you are on the outside looking in, which is exactly how a year abroad can feel.
The cover board is 250gsm uncoated, left unlaminated on purpose. With so much open sky on the front, a sealed gloss surface would have turned it into a glare. Uncoated board keeps the blues chalky and calm, and the whole thing has the dry, papery handle of a gallery postcard. If your own cover leans on sky, sea or any big soft area of colour, you could borrow that move for yours: skip the lamination and let the paper carry the colour.
A title page with a credit and a cause
Turn the cover and the first thing you meet is a small framed repeat of that fence and sky, with the title set in light capitals above it. Beneath sit two short lines: PHOTOS BY BEN SCRIMGEOUR, and a second naming Social Bite as the cause the zine supports. It is a modest page, but it tells a reader who made this and why before a single spread has opened. Small zines often skip that step. They should not.
Sixty pages of film in white margins
Inside, most photographs get a page apiece, framed by generous white margin. Two figures stand on a seafront promenade opposite a beach where a tall ferris wheel rises into a hazy blue. A pale green vintage car waits under wrought iron balconies, facing a curved cream apartment block hung with red geraniums. Dark pines frame a viewpoint over the city and the sea. One spread leaves the left page completely blank and puts rocks, sea and swimmers on the right, seen from above. That empty page is a breath between pictures, and it makes the next one land harder.
The 150gsm uncoated text stock suits film. Uncoated paper drinks the ink a little, so grain looks like grain and the warm, slightly lifted colour of the negatives stays gentle. A coated sheet would have sharpened everything up and lost some of that softness. Sixty pages at that weight produced a 6mm spine, enough for a proper square edge on a shelf, and enough body for the book to stay open while you look.
The Balcony, a poem among the photographs
Halfway through, the pictures pause for words. A poem titled The Balcony, signed Dan Green, runs across a whole spread in a slim sans serif, ranged left with plenty of air around each stanza. Giving text a spread to itself changes the pace of a photo zine. You slow down, you read, and you come back to the images with different eyes. On uncoated paper the type is easy on the eye, with no sheen to fight. If you are pairing photographs with writing in your own zine, giving words and pictures their own pages is worth planning from the start.
Behind the spine: a template, a cover spread and two missing millimetres
Ben first asked about the zine in March 2021 at 56 inside pages. By July it had grown to 60, and he returned ready to print. We sent him an InDesign template for an A5 portrait cover with a 6mm spine, plus our notes on how a perfect bound cover spread is assembled. His first cover file arrived as separate pieces, so we asked for a single spread of back, spine and front, and he re exported it the next morning.
At proof stage he spotted something himself: pages 18 to 19 had no bleed. He fixed the file, we sent a fresh proof the following day, and he approved it within the hour. That is precisely what a proof is for, and our walkthrough on running pictures past the trim line covers the same fix. The books reached him in early August.
They've arrived all safe and sound, thanks so much for your help with everything
Ben, photographer and maker of Marseille
He added that he would “definitely be recommending Ex Why Zed to others in the future!” and in January 2026 he came back himself, this time with Wee Green Hollow, a new book of his Glasgow work. If you have a folder of film scans from somewhere that changed you, cost up an A5 film zine in a few clicks and see how close your own Marseille is.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100