Sizes of The copyists made up their paper or vellum books by folding four, five or six sheets and placing one within the other, making quires or gatherings of 8, 10 or 12 leaves, known respectively as quater nions, quinterns or quintcrnions, and sexterns, or in Greek tetradia, pentadia and hexadia. The first printers adopted the same method, printing one page at a time and only on one side of the sheet; the register or collation of the quires for guide to the binder was given in the colophon (9.v. below), and only later supplanted by a signature on eachquire, at first inserted by hand, and first printed at Co logne in 1472. When more than one page was printed at once, the number of times the paper had to be folded was a fair guide to the dimensions of the page, at a time when (and for ages later) the paper was made by hand, on frames whose size was held closely alike by the exigencies of human arms; and folio, quarto, octavo, duodecimo, etc., ex pressed not only the absolute fact of folding, but the constructive fact of size. These names were conveniently abbreviated, except the first, to 4to, 8vo, 12mo; and when improved ma chinery and larger sheets of paper enabled still more sheets to be printed at once, the Latin names to correspond were not used at all, the terms 16mo, 24mo, 32mo, being em ployed at once. All these names still survive, though—with the advent of great and machinery which make any size desired for an edition, so long as it is an °engine run' the actual printing on large editions of 64 pages at a time, and minute calculations which figure to an eighth of an inch margin — they have ceased to express any fact worth know ing; and in the United States it is now more usual to give on catalogues the height and breadth of pages. But in Europe the old fashion still prevails. So far as the names now mean anything, a 12mo indicates the usual size of a popular volume or essay volume, and an octavo the stately and dignified memoir or volume of travel or complete works) or cyclopmdia; but in fact even these are rarely printed in less than 16s. A sheet folded in the middle forms two leaves or four pages; and a book composed of such sheets is styled a folio, whether it measure a foot and a half or four feet high. When the sheet is again folded it makes a quarto. In hand-made paper (that used in nearly all the small special editions and those of bibliographical interest) the water line runs either across or down the page, according to the number of foldings. The following scheme is serviceable: Folio, folded once, 4 pages, water line perpendicular; quarto, twice, horizontal; octavo, four times, perpendicular; duodecimo, six times, hori zontal; 16mo, horizontal; l8mo, perpendicu 32mo, perpendicular; 36mo, 48mo, 64mo, horizontal; 72mo, 96tno, perpendicular. In Great Britain for a long period printing paper was chiefly of three sizes — royal, demy and crown; and the book was large or small ac cording to which was used. Derry was the commonest, and the demy octavo was the established form of standard editions. Among books as among men there are giants and dwarfs. The British Museum has the largest and the smallest in the world. The former is an atlas seven feet high, of the 15th century, completely concealing a tall man between the pages, with a binding and clasp which make it look as solid as the walls of a room; the latter is a tiny °bijou* almanac less than an inch square, bound in red morocco, easily to be carried in the finger of a lady's glove.
Certain church books in the Escurial are described as six by four feet; and the volumes of the Napoleonic 'Description de are 371/4 inches high. The Thumb Bible or Toy Bible, on the other hand, was one by one and a half inches; it was not really a Bible, but an abstract, printed in 1693 and dedicated to the Duke of Gloucester, and repeatedly reprinted., Hoepli's Commedia) (1878) is less than 21/4 by 21/4 inches; and Pickering's diamond edition of Tasso measures 31/4 inches high by 17 wide.
Colophons.— These originated with the Assyrian scribes in the 7th century B.C. at latest: Ashurbanipal's in the Nineveh library put at the end of the last column of their cylinders a register of the documents com posing the The early printers fol lowed the same style, using the last paragraph of the last page — now called by English book men the colophon (Greek, apex or terminus), by French the souscription, by Germans the schluss Schrift — to.give details about the book,
which we should now assign to the titlepage, or merely for a sort of envoi or (send-off.° The usual terminus of books was Finis," Finis,° (Here Endeth,° or some thing of the sort; but some printers expanded it into elaborate epilogues or postfaces. Caxton is notable for this; see examples in Blade's 'Caxton,' and for others see Legrand's Hellenique' (1:45). With development of the titlepage, the colophon disappeared, though instances are found well into the 16th century.
Title Pages.— It is curious that while the early development of printing ran to enormous and elaborate titlepages, Caxton has none at all, except one to a work not certainly his, (The Chastising of God's Children' (?1491); and even that contains only three lines of ordinary print. But in Venice as early as 1474 a by John de Monteregio was issued by Pictor, Loslein and Ratdolt, with a quaint rhyming titlepage, with place, date and names at the foot. A facsimile is given in Bouchot's (The Printed Book.' The treatment of the titlepage has varied enor mously with different periods. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was at its worst; the object apparently being to make it a digest of the entire contents of the book (Narcs' (Life of Burleigh,) of which Macaulay says that the title is as long as an ordinary preface,D is a mild example in the 19th), and half destroying the very object of the title by making it difficult to wade through and come at the real theme. Frequently it gave a laudatory description of the book, a plan which if adopted to-day would save the re viewers the trouble of reading the preface: aA Book Right Rare and Strange,° (Very Necessary to be Known,° Pleasant and etc., are familiar to the student of early printing. Modern titles are thought to violate both good taste and good business judgment in going beyond a short plain sentence or name; but they sometimes do worse by misleading the cataloguer, as when Ruskin's 'Notes on the Construction of Sheep folds' is classed among works on live stock. Double titles, as where a sub-title is given of a seemingly different purport from the main one, are also perilous. As to the frequent practice of reissuing an old book under a new title, it is pure fraud, wasting the money of libraries and private buyers on what they have already or do not want, throwing cata logues out, and making confusion all around. The punishment of using a title already ap propriated, even unknowingly, is direct and by law, for the title of a book is protected by law as much as any other part of the con tents. For the lore and facsimiles of title pages, see Andrew Lang's "Old French Title Pages" in 'Books and Bookmen' ; Le Petit's 'Principales Editions originales d'Ecrivains francais) (1888); and Konnecke's Tilderat las' (1887).
Dating of Books.— One of the most ex asperating traits of the early printers, like the monkish scribes, was its rarely occurring to them to put dates to their books. Only five out of 21 of the known works of Colard Mansion, Caxton's master, arc dated, and more than two-thirds of Caxton's own are dateless. On the other hand, in the colophon to the 'Moral Proverbs' and in the 'Book of the Knight of the Tower,' the dates are set down with excessive minuteness, even to the month and day. Modern publishers only fail to date a work when it is out of date and the fact is to be concealed from the buyer; a common deception of the trade is to reissue an old work with a new titlepage and usually a new copyright date, sometimes shifting the introductory matter so as to change the pagination or "facing)) The usual and now universal date is either by Roman numerals (an antiquated annoyance it would be better to abolish), or by Arabic numerals, which for some inscrutable reason are held a trifle underbred. In the earlier books some queer freaks are indulged in. One is to put Roman lower-case numerals before some of the capitals as multipliers; unfortunately, others use exactly the same as signs of subtraction, and others still use cap ital letters as subtractors, so that the reader's guess needs confirming from outside. For example: