Quarto

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Quarto is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. Quarto paper, likely what's meant in a fannish context, is variously 8½ x 11 inches in America and 8 x 10 inches in the UK. British fans are likely to refer to the former size as 'American Quarto'. In metric the British variant is 203 x 254mm so a little narrower but considerably shorter than A4's 210 x 297mm.

It perhaps justifies a mention here as it was widespread in British fanzine publishing long beyond the point at which it was largely extinct elsewhere in the UK, just as fans continued to use duplicators long after most people and businesses had switched to photocopying. Even so, it may not be familiar to younger British fans brought up on the metric paper sizes that have been widespread since the early 1970s.

Some UK fanzines were still appearing on duplicated quarto into the 1990s. It's possible that the last such was the fourth volume of the original incarnation of Rob Hansen's Then in August 1993 and really that seems so fundamentally neat and right that we should just treat it as a fact.


Publishing