Why page counts come in fours

One sheet, four pages

Open a stapled zine at the middle and look at the staples. What you’re holding is a stack of sheets of paper, each folded once down the centre and stapled through the fold. An A5 zine is made from A4 sheets. Fold one in half and you have two A5 pages on the front and two on the back: four pages from one sheet. There is no way to get three, or five.

Every stapled zine is built like this, so its page count is always a number that divides by four. A 16-page zine is four sheets; a 24-page zine is six; a 40-page zine is ten. A 22-page zine can’t be made. If you have 22 pages of material, the zine will still be 24 pages, and the other two will be blank. Blank pages count.

The covers are part of the count. The outermost sheet carries the back cover and the front cover on its outside, and the inside front and inside back covers on its inside. In the studio, the page count includes them: choose 24 pages and you have the four cover pages and 20 inside pages, shown as twelve spreads (two facing pages). Printers who offer a heavier card cover sometimes count it as four more pages on top of the inside pages, so check how your printer counts before you fix on a number.

Where the fours come from

None of this is new. Books have been made from folded sheets for centuries, and the names bibliographers use for old books still describe the folds. The College of Charleston Libraries’ guide to the history of the book puts it simply: in a folio each sheet has been folded once, in a quarto twice, in an octavo three times. Each fold doubles the leaves, so a folio sheet gives four pages, a quarto eight and an octavo sixteen. The same guide notes that “the sheet is the printer’s unit, the leaf the bibliographer’s”. A stapled zine is a folio in all but name: a stack of sheets, each folded once.

The folding also explains something that surprises many first-time makers when they print a dummy (a rough printed copy) at home: the pages on each sheet are not in reading order. The Folger Shakespeare Library, describing how Shakespeare’s plays were printed in quarto, explains that eight pages were printed on one sheet, four on each side, and that “printers set pages of type in different patterns on the sheet of paper so that they would be in order after folding”. In a quarto, pages 1 and 8 sat next to each other, head to head with pages 4 and 5. The reading order appeared only once the sheets were folded and gathered.

Printers call this arrangement imposition, and they still do it. For a stapled zine, the outer sheet carries the first and last pages, the next sheet the second and the second-last, and so on in towards the middle, where the two centre pages sit side by side on one sheet. You don’t need to work any of this out. Printers ask for a single PDF with the pages in reading order, one after another, and impose it themselves; the studio’s print-ready PDF is made that way. At home, the booklet setting in most print dialogues does the same job for a dummy (see Making and testing a dummy).

Count the sheets, and the pages take care of themselves.

Choosing a count

The studio offers every count that divides by four from 16 to 40 pages, at every size. Which one suits you depends on how many photographs survive the edit, and how much room you want to give them. With one photograph to a page, a 24-page zine holds about 20, once the covers, a title page and the colophon (the small page of credits at the end) have taken theirs. Fewer if some run across a spread, and fewer still if you leave pages empty on purpose.

That last option is worth taking seriously. Having 22 photographs and 24 pages isn’t a problem to solve by adding two more pictures. The photographer and writer Andrew Molitor describes the most conservative way to lay out a photobook as printing the photographs on the right-hand pages and leaving the left blank, and he notes that blank space, like repeated pictures, speeds a reader up. Two empty pages, or one photograph given a spread to itself, often do more for a sequence than two extra pictures would. Going the other way is just as good an answer: a tighter edit and a 16-page zine. Many fine zines are short.

If the count still won’t come out, a dummy will settle it. Print the free proof at the count you’re considering and read it through. The pages will feel full, empty or right, and you’ll know which.

Thick zines and creep

Staples set the upper limit. The more sheets you nest, the thicker the fold, and past a point the zine won’t lie flat or hold its staples. Printers set a maximum page count for stapling, and it falls as the paper gets heavier. Where the line sits varies from printer to printer, but it is well above 40 pages on light paper and drops with thicker stock. That is one reason the studio’s zines stop at 40 pages, and why longer books are bound differently. Perfect-bound books (pages glued into a square spine) are made from folded sections of 8, 16 or 32 pages gathered together, so their counts tend to come in eights or sixteens: 80 pages is five sections of 16. Photobooks will come to the studio later, with page counts of their own.

Nesting has one more effect. Each sheet folded inside another sits a little further from the spine, so by the middle of the zine the inner pages push out beyond the outer ones at the open edge. Printers call this creep. They allow for it when they impose the pages and trim the finished zine, nudging each spread slightly towards the spine so that the margins look even all the way through. There is nothing for you to correct, and a file shifted by hand to allow for creep ends up corrected twice. What does help is keeping page numbers, captions and anything else that matters a comfortable distance from the outer edge, which the studio’s margins already do. With ten sheets of ordinary paper the creep is small. With heavy paper it shows, which is another reason printers cap the count.

Sources and further reading

• College of Charleston Libraries, “History of the Book”: a folio folded once, a quarto twice, an octavo three times; “the sheet is the printer’s unit, the leaf the bibliographer’s”.
• Folger Shakespeare Library, “DIY Quarto: Exercise 1”: eight pages printed on one sheet, four a side; pages set out of order so that they read correctly after folding; pages 1 and 8 side by side, head to head with 4 and 5.
• Folger Shakespeare Library, Folgerpedia, “Bibliographic format”: format as the relationship between a full sheet of paper and the folded leaves of a book; a folio folded once, a quarto folded in half and then in half again.
• Andrew Molitor, “Sequencing, Part I”, Luminous Landscape (14 August 2023): photographs on the right with the left blank as the most conservative approach; blank space and repeated pictures speed the reader up.