Blog
Zines
2023-11-03
I showed off an unfinished version of the content in this blog post in the first
Finite Group live stream in October. I'll be showing off other upcoming things and other
content at future Finite Group events. If you'd like to watch this, you can sign up to our Patreon at
finitegroup.co.uk.
A few months ago at Cheltenham Science Festival, Hana Ayoob showed me how to make an 8-page zine.
If you've not make one before, I recommend following these steps now.
Take a piece of A4 paper, and fold it 3 times like this:
![](javascript:showlimage("8zine1.png"))
Unfold all the folds except the first one and cut along the red line:
![](javascript:showlimage("8zine2.png"))
After unfolding, your paper should look like this:
![](javascript:showlimage("8zine3.png"))
Fold the paper in half the other way:
![](javascript:showlimage("8zine4.png"))
Push the two ends of the paper together so that the front of the middle bit of paper comes forward,
and the back goes backward:
![](javascript:showlimage("8zine5.png"))
Finally, flatten all the pages and you have your zine:
![](javascript:showlimage("8zine6.png"))
You're now free to write or draw whatever you like on the 8 pages of your zine.
If you'd like to fold a zine that already has content printed on it, you can
print the instructions for the TMiP puzzle hunt that I wrote earlier this year, or you can print this blog post off in zine format.
A 16-page zine
If you're anything like me, you'll already be wondering if it's possible to do some more folding
and cutting to make a 16-page zine from a piece of A4. After some trial and error, I found that
you can if you fold the paper 4 times then cut along these red lines:
![](javascript:showlimage("16zine1.png"))
(This time, I've drawn the diagram with a portrait piece of paper, as this leads to a portrait zine. For an 8-page zine, a landscape piece of paper led to a portrait zine.)
Instead of drawing which lines we need to cut, we can represent our two zines so far by drawing
lines that connect the pages in order:
![](javascript:showlimage("8and16zines.png"))
During my experimentation, I saw that every second connection between pages must be horizontal.
These horizontal connections end up in the spine of the zine and allow the pages to turn.
If you can't visualise why the pages won't turn if this condition doesn't hold, try making a 16-page
zine like this:
![](javascript:showlimage("failed16zine.png"))
32-page zines
Now that we can make a 16-page zine, the obvious question is: can we make a 32-page zine?
To answer this, we need to look for lines that go through all
32 pages where every second connection is a horizontal. I wrote a Python script to look for these and it
found 3:
![](javascript:showlimage("32zines.png"))
The code also told me that the 8- and 16-page zines we know about are the only 8- and 16-page
zines. I'm only counting the zines where the pages in the final zine are portrait, and have the same side ratio a the original piece of A4 paper:
there will be other possible zines where the pages are landscape that we aren't counting.
2n-page zines
Now that we have 8-page, 16-page, and 32-page zines, we can look for patterns that we
can generalise to make a 2n-page zine. This generalisation was the first I
came up with:
![](javascript:showlimage("2nzines.png"))
One possible 2n-page zine for n=3 to 12 (click to enlarge)
There are, of course, many other generalisations that you could come up with.
How many zines?
While working towards our generalised zine, you may have started pondering another question:
for any given n, how many different 2n-page zines can be made?
For n=2, there's only one way to make a zine (fold the paper twice).
For n=3 to 6, we've already seen that there are 1, 1, and 3 ways to make zines. The code
I wrote was also able to tell me that there are 31 possible 64-page zines:
![](javascript:showlimage("64zines.png"))
All 31 possible 64-page zines (click to enlarge)
So the start of the sequence of the number of possible zines is: 1, 1, 1, 3, 31.
The number of different possible paths to check increases very quickly as we increase
n, so I was unable to compute the next term in a reasonable amount of time.
I've submitted this sequence to the OEIS. Let's
hope someone is able to work out the next term. If you're that someone, let me know!
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Comments
Comments in green were written by me. Comments in blue were not written by me.
⭐ top comment (2026-04-08) ⭐
This is hilarious. I was looking up ways to fold zines beyond the typical 8-pager and found this. Thanks for the laughs. I will test some of these out tomorrow.Lou
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