What is FOLIO Format? Introduction & Description
Folio is used as an approximate term for a size of book, typically about 15 in . (38 cm) tall, and as such does not necessarily indicate the actual printing format of the books, which might even be unknown as is the case for many modern books. Other common book formats are quarto and octavo , that are both also printing formats, involving two and three folds in the sheet respectively.
Format A folio (from Latin foliō, abl. associated with folium, leaf [2] ) is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets of document, on each sheet of which four pages of text are printed, two on each side; each sheet is then folded once to produce two leaves. Each leaf of a folio book thus is one half the size of the original linen. This contrasts with a quarto , folding each sheet twice, and octavo , folding each sheet three times. Unlike the actual folio, these last, and further types involving more folds, require the pages of the book to be cut open following binding, which might be done mechanically by the printer, but in historic books was often left for the reader related to a paper‐knife . Lenox copy of the Gutenberg bible printed in folio format. There are variations in how folios tend to be produced. For example, bibliographers call a book printed as a folio (two leaves per full sheet), but sure in gatherings of 8 leaves each, a "folio in 8s. " The Gutenberg Bible was printed in about 1455 like a folio, in which four pages of text were printed on each sheet of paper, which were then folded once. The actual page size is 12 x 17. 5 inches (307 x 445 mm), a "double folio" size. Several such folded conjugate pairs of leaves were inserted inside each other
to produce the sections or gatherings, which were then sewn together to form the final book. Shakespeare's First Folio edition is printed like a folio and has a page height of 12. 5 inches (320 mm), making it a rather small folio dimension. Folios were a common format of books printed in the incunabula period (books printed before 1501), even though earliest printed book, surviving only as a fragment of a leaf, is a quarto. The British Library Incunabula Brief Title Catalogue currently lists about 28, 100 different editions of surviving books, pamphlets and broadsides (some fragmentary just) printed before 1501, of which about 8, 600 are folios, representing just over 30 percent of all works within the catalogue.
Page numbering Left‐to‐right language books (such as English) Right‐to‐left language books (such as Arabic) Recto as well as verso In the discussion of manuscripts, a folio means a leaf with two pages, the recto being the very first the reader encounters, and the verso the second. In Western books, which are read by turning the pages over from to left, when the book is begun with the open page edges at the reader's right, the first page to be observed is "folio 1 recto", typically abbreviated to "f1 r. ". When this page is turned over "f1 v. " is about the left and "f2 r. " on the right of the "opening", or two pages that are visible. For books within Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and other languages, where the book is begun from the back in Western terms, with the open page edges in the reader's left, the numbering also follows the sequence in which the reader encounters. In the discussion of two‐columned manuscripts, a/b/c/d may denote the left and right‐hand columns of recto and verso pages (e. g. "f. 150a" and "f. 150b" would be the left and right hand columns on the recto page, and "f. 150c" and "f. 150d" the left and right hand columns about the verso page). In the discussion of three‐columned manuscripts, notation may make use of folio number + recto/verso + line a/b/c (e. g. "f. 3 v. col. c" references the third column on the verso side of the 3rd folio).
Size The actual size of a folio book depends on the size of the full sheet of paper which it was printed, and in older periods these were not standardized, so the term's meaning is only approximate. Historically, printers used a variety of names such as (with approximate maximum page height): Double Elephant Folio (50 inches, 127 cm), Atlas Folio (twenty five inches, ca 63 cm), Elephant Folio (23 inches, ca 58 cm), Royal Folio (20 inches, california 51 cm), Medium Folio (18 inches, ca 46 cm), Crown Folio (15 inches (ca 37 cm), and the most common). [7]
From the mid‐nineteenth century, technology permitted the manufacture of large sheets or rolls of paper which books were printed, many text pages at a time. As a result, it may be impossible to determine the real format (i. e., number of leaves formed from each sheet fed into a press). The term "folio" as put on such books may refer simply to the size, i. e., books that are approximately 15 inches (38 cm) high.
Shakespeare folios From the earliest days of printing, folios were often used for expensive, prestigious volumes. In the Seventeenth Hundred years, plays of the English Renaissance theatre were printed as collected editions in folio. Thirty‐six of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, were included in the First Folio collected edition of 1623, which was followed by additional folio editions, referred to since the Second Folio , etc. Other playwrights in this period also published their plays in folio editions, such as Ben Jonson 's gathered works of 1616.
Examples of Folio Format Cortiada, Michael de. Decisiones cancellarii & sacri regii senatus Cathaloniae. Editio novissima. Venice: Former mate typographia Balleoniana, 1727. 2°: a4 A‐Z8, 2a‐b8 c6 [$4(‐a3,4, 2c4) signed]; 210 leaves, pp. [8] 1‐368, 21‐44 (misprinting 348 as forty eight) On the treatment of duplicated series, see Bowers pp. 207‐10 (signatures) and 280 (pagination). It may make more sense to treat the preliminary gathering in this book as ‘πa4'; but since the pagination of the catalog could only be expressed as 21‐44, it seemed neater to treat the corresponding signatures as 2a‐ b8 c6. The misprinting associated with p. 348 (with a space for the “3") may be a feature of some copies only, the “3" having been pulled from the form in inking, and then perhaps later replaced: a “press accident”.