I doubt I am the first person to conceive of what I have come to call a "4pagezine". It is pretty self-explanatory. It's four pages. In America its ideally an 8 1/2in x 11in or similarly sized standard sheet of printer paper. Why have a four page zine? I suppose you could say that its the easiest of all zines to produce. In my case, I have a small heading with the name of a poem and my name, perhaps announce it as a "4pagezine", and then fill it with poetry.

There are antecedents to this, but I have little knowledge of them. The ease of publication encourages its production. There is no stapling, no special equipment required except a printer or copier. One simply prepares two sides of a letter sized sheet of paper for printing, prints it, folds it in half, and it is done. Is it lazy? Only if we're looking to do more than a 4pagezine and opt for the format instead of doing a more complete work. In my mind, in this information age of constant bombardment of information it has the sense of permanency of a physical object, but does not use many resources, can be easily mailed in a 6 x 9 envelope, and one has four pages with which to express themselves. As such, it is a worthy format for writing.

Ideally, the sellers of 4pagezines sell them for not too much. The price of postage is small. Good paper should be used. In return, it would be nice if a customer were to buy multiple 4pagezines (saving money on postage). Obviously, we would not be looking to get rich selling 4pagezines (or really, any other zines), but it is OK to make a few bucks if someone buys a bundle. Etsy is a place to sell them, although perhaps a different website which is community-organized could be built for the offering of said zines. Since Etsy is a capitalist entity, perhaps poets and other writers or artists who want to use the format can build a website which offers them without any corporation influencing search results and all of the money going to artists with an extremely, not-profitable portion taken for the expenses of running the site.

The zines are easily reproducible with a scanner, and I suppose I could inject the idea that their reproduction should be allowed as long as they are not sold and that the PDFs of said zines may be made available at the author's discretion. I am not an arbiter of good and evil, I'll leave that up to others, but I would like to say that I personally (in my own opinion) think this would be an ideal state of affairs.

I don't think there should be any limitations as to the amount of zines produced, and I think it would be nice if artists collaborated to make compilations of 4pagezines, or produced compilations of their own works in book form. It is a malleable format, and the imagination is the limit. But taking these ubiquitous sheets of office paper and turning them into poetry, mailing it to people, I like this idea that I've had, and I would like it to come to fruition.

These things would find themselves laying around on tables in various places. Perhaps a poem or set of ideas that were dreamed up by the author would find its way into peoples' minds by picking up one of these 4pagezines. They can be stacked, neatly organized into piles on tables. A 4pagezine is short enough to hold the attention of our social-media-addled society, more filling than a meme and more tangible as well.

My proposal is that 4pagezines have a brief heading with information about what it is on a couple lines (a title) and contact information at the end. This should be sufficient. A 4pagezine is ultimately more about function than form, although it is itself a tangible result of a human's creativity.

Ultimately it is up to the artist what to put on a 4pagezine. I am not a fan of social media, having left it except for occasionally posting on Reddit, but surely the hashtag #4pagezine could produce some results on whatever social media that is used. The idea of a 4pagezine is a creative idea, and the ease of creation leads to a low barrier for entry, which allows anyone to use it. I would like to see it used.