Folio And Volume Number

[Magin Sriubas]

Theterm "folio" (from Latin folium 'leaf'[1]) has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book made in this way; second, it is a general term for a sheet, leaf or page in (especially) manuscripts and old books; and third, it is an approximate term for the size of a book, and for a book of this size.

First, a folio (abbreviated fo or 2o) is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets of paper, on each 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 sheet. Ordinarily, additional printed folio sheets would be inserted inside one another to form a group or "gathering" of leaves prior to binding the book.

Second, folio is used in terms of page numbering for some books and most manuscripts that are bound but without page numbers as an equivalent of "page" (both sides), "sheet" or "leaf", using "recto" and "verso" to designate the first and second sides, and (unlike the usage in printing) disregarding whether the leaf concerned is actually physically still joined with another leaf. This usually appears abbreviated: "f26r." means the first side of the 26th leaf in a book. This will be on the right hand side of the opening of any book composed in a script that is read from left to right, such as Latin (as used in English), Cyrillic, or Greek, and will be opposite for books composed in a script that is read from right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Third, folio is also used as an approximate term for a size of book, typically about 15 inches (38 cm) tall, and as such does not necessarily indicate the actual printing format of the books, which may even be unknown as is the case for many modern books.[citation needed] Other common book formats are quarto and octavo, which are both also printing formats, involving two and three folds in the sheet respectively.

Famous folios (in both senses) include the Gutenberg Bible, printed in about 1455, and the First Folio collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, printed in 1623; however, their actual size is rather different.

A folio (from Latin foliō, abl. of folium, leaf[2]) is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets of paper, on each sheet of which four pages of text are printed, two on each side; each sheet is then folded one time to produce two leaves. Each leaf of a folio book thus is one half the size of the original sheet. This contrasts with a quarto, folding each sheet twice, and octavo, folding each sheet three times. Unlike the folio, these last, and further types involving more folds, require the pages of the book to be cut open after binding, which might be done mechanically by the printer, but in historic books was often left for the reader to do with a paper-knife.

The Gutenberg Bible was printed in about 1455 as a folio, in which four pages of text were printed on each sheet of paper, which were then folded once. The 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 one another to produce the sections or gatherings, which were then sewn together to form the final book. Shakespeare's First Folio edition is printed as a folio and has a page height of 12.5 inches (320 mm), making it a rather small folio size.[4]

Folios were a common format of books printed in the incunabula period (books printed before 1501), although the earliest printed book, surviving only as a fragment of a leaf, is a quarto. The British Library Incunabula Short Title Catalogue currently lists about 28,100 different editions of surviving books, pamphlets and broadsides (some fragmentary only) printed before 1501,[5] of which about 8,600 are folios,[6] representing just over 30 percent of all works in the catalogue.

In the discussion of manuscripts, a folio means a leaf with two pages, the recto being the first the reader encounters, and the verso the second. In Western books, which are read by turning the pages over from right to left, when the book is begun with the open page edges at the reader's right, the first page to be seen is "folio 1 recto", typically abbreviated to "f1 r.". When this page is turned over "f1 v." is on the left and "f2 r." on the right of the "opening", or two pages that are visible. For books in Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and other languages, where the book is begun from the back in Western terms, with the open page edges at 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 can denote the left- and right-hand columns of recto and verso pages (e.g. "f. 150a" and "f. 150b" are the left and right columns on the recto page, and "f. 150c" and "f. 150d" the left and right columns on the verso page). In the discussion of three-columned manuscripts, notation may make use of folio number + recto/verso + column a/b/c (e.g. "f. 3 v. col. c" references the third column on the verso side of the third folio).

The actual size of a folio book depends on the size of the full sheet of paper on which it was printed, and in older periods these were not standardized, so the term's meaning is only approximate. Historically, printers used a range of names such as (with approximate maximum page height):

From the mid-nineteenth century, technology permitted the manufacture of large sheets or rolls of paper on which books were printed, many text pages at a time. As a result, it became nearly impossible to determine the actual format (i.e., number of leaves formed from each sheet fed into a press). The term "folio" as applied to such books may refer simply to the size, i.e., books that are approximately 15 inches (38 cm) tall.

From the earliest days of printing, folios were often used for expensive, prestigious volumes. In the seventeenth century, plays of the English Renaissance theatre were printed as collected editions in folio. Thirty-six of Shakespeare's plays, for example, were included in the First Folio collected edition of 1623, which was followed by additional folio editions, referred to as the Second Folio, etc. Other playwrights in this period also published their plays in folio editions, such as Ben Jonson's collected works of 1616.

The Special Collections in the University Archives and Area Research Center includes a number of oversize folios in the medium and elephant size, plus one double set of double elephant folios. Several of these are described below.

The Birds of America, from Original Drawings by John James Audubon, was published by the author in London, between 1827-1838, in 4 "double-elephant" volumes of broadsheets. There are 435 hand-colored, etched, and aqua-tinted plates in an original double-elephant folio set. Only about 130 of the original 200 sets of Audubon's Birds of America are in existence today.

UWRF's two reproduction volumes are selections from Audubon's double-elephant folio, published in 1973 by Voyageur Press of Minnesota, Ariel Press of London, and Edition Leipzig of Germany. The publishers were known for producing high-quality facsimiles, historical reprints, and/or nature and wilderness books. Only 250 copies of The Birds of America: A Selection of Landscape Plates Facsimile were produced for sale in North America. UWRF's volumes are numbered 937 (North American volumes number 750 to 1000).

Volume 1 contains all portrait-shaped reproductions and volume 2 contains all landscape-shaped. Audubon's original folio pages were 39" by 29", the pages in the reproduction volumes are 38" tall by 26" wide.

In 1981 the Audubon Society published magnificent reproductions of Audubon's hand-colored engravings in full color, organized for the first time in modern phylogenetic order. The 435-page publication has 917 illustrations, including 482 in full color. The book is affectionately known as the "Baby Elephant" folio.

Beginning in 1933, a series of four huge (elephant folio sized) volumes was published entitled The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos, edited by Alan H. Gardiner, and largely devoted to the superb and beautiful copies of the wall paintings of the temple done by Amice Calverley. The books were published jointly by the Egypt Exploration Society and the University of Chicago. The vast expense of these magnificent publications was paid by John D. Rockefeller, as it was far beyond the capacities of the Society and the University. These volumes, which are a priceless record of Egyptian temple art, sacred likenesses, and the pharaonic cults, are extremely rare.

Amice Mary Calverley (1896-1959) was a 20th-century Egyptologist who was instrumental to the recording and publication of the decoration in the temple of King Sethos I at Abydos. In 1926 she started to teach herself drawing for archaeology at the British Museum. In 1928, Calverley was engaged by the Egypt Exploration Society to work as part of a project to record the decoration in the temple of King Sethos I at Abydos. The project was initially conceived as a purely photographic publication, but because of the quality of Calverley's draughtsmanship and her high standards, the more ambitious publication you see here was possible.

Kurz and Allison were a major publisher of chromolithographs in the late 19th century. They built their reputation on large prints published in the mid-1880s depicting battles of the American Civil War. The company tried to capitalize on the growing sentimentalism among Civil War veterans. In all, a set of thirty-six battle scenes were published from designs by Louis Kurz, himself a veteran of the war.

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