Organization for Transformative Works News

Something I brought up a little while back over on the fediverse:

Hey, remember the fad a while back for these things called pocketmods? If you don't remember the name, you might remember them as those things you would print on a sheet of paper, fold in half along the long axis and into four sections the other way, then make a careful slice down the middle... and if you did it all correctly you had a little pocket sized, eight page booklet with advice on some subject or with small forms on which you could note down how you were spending money to aid in keeping up with your finances, or small RPG booklets. If you remember these (or never forgot them) you may also remember that you only printed to one side of the paper because when you folded it all up each page of the booklet was one side of a folded double thickness section. When I ran across pocketmods again recently this bothered me. You literally, as in really truly literally as well as emphasis literally, lose 50% of the available page surface when you make a pocketmod.

(Assume that I spent the next five minutes not-quite-ranting grumbling about this and just move on to the next paragraph)

What if I told you there was a better way to get small pocket sized booklet that still used a single sheet of paper? All you need to add to the process is either a needle and thread or a stapler. Let me introduce you to a little thing called an octavo. If you check the illustration on the linked page it's the third one down. You make three folds which divide the sheet up into eight sections (thus the name octavo). After you third fold you have something in the form of a little booklet. Now, after the three folds you need to either use the needle and thread to do a 3-hole pamphlet stitch to hold it together or grab the nearest stapler and use one or two staples to hold it together. Now you just need to make a couple of cuts. There are two visible folds on the bottom edge and two on one half of the sheets on the side opposite the spine. You can either use a straight edge or blade to carefully slice right along the folds to separate the pages, trim those two sides with a pair of scissors, or you can do what I did and place a metal straight edge down about two millimeters in from the edge and use a blade to trim off a little strip. Do the last on the three non-spine edges and you'll have nice neat pages with corners that meet cleanly.

If you would like to see the result you can click on the link to see my post over on part of the fediverse a few days back that includes a picture (and a link to a different octavo fold explanation on a site that includes sample pdfs of Shakespeare that you can print and fold). That one in the picture took only a few minutes, including the time spent searching for and reopening the link to the web site with the octavo example to double check that I was remembering the folds right. Fold, fold, fold, staple, staple, slice, slice, slice and I had myself a 16 page pocket notebook for something I'd need to take notes on over the next week or so. It is unlikely to be the last one I make, as they are just handy little things. As noted over on mastodon these little booklets fit quite nicely into a little pouch I have on hand that is intended to be used as a cell phone holder. But it could likely easily hold a half dozen or more little booklets like this. Oh, and nothing is stopping you from folding two sheets of paper, nestling one inside the other and then sewing or stapling and then instead of a 16 page booklet you have a 32 page booklet.

And I'll likely make some bigger booklets. I have a long reach stapler which means if I do a folio (they fancy way of saying just folding a single sheet once dividing it into four pages) signature I wouldn't have any trouble reaching in the 5.5 inches to staple the spine if I don't feel like sewing (and unlike most smaller staplers it has an adjustable paper stop and measuring guide to help you staple at the exact distance you want). About a decade ago I did a project I called at the time Character A Day (but have since referred to as the Seven Days, Seven Characters world-building project). For seven days I came up with a character, wrote a bit about them, wrote up RPG stats using the FATE Accelerated system, and included a setting aspect. At the end of the seven days I had seven characters as well as a setting for them. I've been considering for a while now grabbing those posts, doing a cleaner rewrite, maybe including a little more, and putting it together as a small pdf. 4.25" x 5.5" is not an uncommon page size for indie RPG pdfs. As long as the revised version stayed under or not much over 48 pages at that page size then it would be easy to do up a single signature from a stack of pages (I believe the manufacturer says the long reach stapler I have should be able to do up to twenty pages, but a dozen is probably much easier to staple through and twelve sheets would be forty-eight pages).