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Yours portly has long been interested in the world of guerrilla publishing—zines, independent newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, newsletters, and the like. Blogging scratches some of that itch and captures some of that energy, but there’s something cool about finding a little bit of printed material out in the wild.

Back in college, a buddy of mine put together a fake newspaper called The Heartland-Crier Gazette. It was meant to mimic the style of eighteenth-century pamphlets, with different fonts for each piece (and even one using the letter “f” in place of “s,” like some manuscripts from that time). We published a couple of issues and put them around campus, but it never went anywhere. More successful was the website my friends and I ran, The Swain Site (I think it was at http://www.keepingitswain.tk, back when .tk extensions were a thing). I wrote a lengthy weekly piece called “Uncle Tybarb’s Corner,” which was essentially a proto-blog.

I was scrolling through Instagram a few nights ago and came upon the latest creation from artist Obvious Plant. Obvious Plant makes fake products and catalogues that look like the kinds of things you’d find in dusty discount stores. They are just on the edge of reality enough that their absurdism seems tangible, like something a factory owner in China would make thinking it would appeal to Americans.

His latest item is a sales paper for a fictitious discount store called Cheep’s. It had me laughing harder than I have in awhile. What was particularly fun is that OP placed about 100 of the sales papers in an empty newspaper/advert box, and the idea of someone coming along and grabbing one made the whole concept even funnier.

It also got me thinking: why couldn’t I do something similar, but less absurd than Cheep’s or the truly absurdist Heartland-Crier Gazette? I have this sweet new printer that can print hundreds of black-and-white pages on a single drum of toner. What if I created a small micro-newspaper?

So Thursday morning I set to work devising a little newspaper that could fit on one-quarter of a sheet of 8.5″x11″ printer/copier paper. I relied heavily on CoPilot to help me get the formatting right in Microsoft Word, which was the hardest part (that and creating a crossword puzzle). I had to make some tweaks and figure out some clever workarounds, as Word is famously limited when it comes to moving stuff around freely, but after about two or three hours I had a draft of the first issue.

Other than the formatting, the crossword puzzle was the most difficult part, as well as creating the “solution” grid and flipping it over. CoPilot was super helpful with creating the grid itself, but when I asked it to create a crossword for me, it failed utterly. The answers didn’t match the clues, and it would use vastly different letters between the “Across” and “Down” clues, to the point that there often weren’t any letters in common between words that were supposed to intersect. I finally told it that it was really bad at creating crosswords (sometimes the robots need reminding that they’re inferior to us), so it recommended Eclipse Crossword, a downloadable program that creates crossword puzzles for you based on user-created word banks. I then took the grid it created and reformatted it into the grid CoPilot helped me created in Word.

The solution grid required filling out the grid in Word; taking a screenshot with “Print Screen”; pasting it into MS Paint Classic; copying the proper selection (Word copies a large margin to the left of the grid, so it has to be trimmed in Paint); then using “Paste Special” in Word to paste the image as a “Picture – Enhanced Metafile” in order for Word to allow me to rotate (it just occurred to me that it would be much easier to flip the image in Paint—d’oh!).

Once all of that was done, I had a beautiful little micro-newspaper:

The beauty of this format is that I can create 100 copies of an issue on just twenty-five sheets of copier paper. A sheet is around $0.014, so it’s about 35 cents worth of paper. The toner itself is abundant—I can print 700 pages on the current toner drum—and there are third-party toners that are very inexpensive, so I figure I’m spending around 50 cents to $1 to produce an issue.

I then had to cut every issue. I’m going to invest in one of those cutting boards like offices have—you know, those things that look like you could cut someone’s head off with them, but they only cut through about four sheets of paper before they mess up—but for the first issue, I used scissors. Even though everything looked perfectly symmetrical in Word, printing through the top of the front page off slightly from the top of the back page, so the finished product is a little rougher.

Here are some pictures of the first issue, as well as a couple of the second issue:

I made a few little mistakes on the first few copies of the first issue; for example, I forgot to put “DOWN” before the down clues on the crossword puzzle. I also had some rough cuts, as I’m not master with scissors. Overall, though, the initial run of 100 issues came out looking quite nice, and I’m learning more how to make my own crossword puzzles in tighter spaces.

With the first issue formatted, written, printed, and cut, I needed to get it into the hands of readers. My plan was straightforward: visit several local businesses—with an emphasis on coffee shops, breakfast and lunch places, and some other local stores—and ask to leave copies on their counters. After Dr. Wife was off to work and the morning dishes and laundry were squared away, I set off to do just that.

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