[Moo] Why are books so big? (Google Penance)

[Bertran]

  Sent to you by Bertran via Google Reader: Why are books so big?
(Google Penance) via Got Medieval by noreply at blogger.com (Got Medieval)
on 8/10/10
It's Google Penance time once again!* Seems the Google algorithm
ferried a confused soul to my post about the silly study that claimed
you could tell how big portion sizes were throughout history by looking
at famous pictures contained in a single coffee table book, when all
said confused soul wanted to know was, "Why are medieval books so
big?"**

Ah, my poor wayward Googler, medieval books are no bigger or smaller
than modern books, generally speaking. Gutenberg and the other early
printers didn't invent a whole new format for books, they just copied
what people were already using.

The question then becomes, I guess, why were medieval books the size
they were? And the answer to that is simple: medieval books were the
size they were because medieval sheep were the size they were.
Remember, paper wasn't the original medium for page-creation. Medieval
books were constructed of parchment, which is a fancy word for sheep or
goat skin (and primarily sheep skin, because there were a lot more of
them around). So take your average sheep:


Skin her and trim off the curvy parts where her legs used to be, and
you get one gigantic sheet of parchment, way too big for most
bookmaking purposes.


But that's fine, because you can fold it in half and you'll get a huge
but manageable pair of leaves (four pages counting front and back),
which you can gather with a lot of other similarly sized leaves and
make a "folio"-sized book, the sort of giant monstrosity of a book that
you have to leave spread out on a table before you in order to read and
which, not surprisingly, they don't tend to make too many of these
days. It's good size for a fancy atlas, but since we've all got Google
Earth, who needs that? Or if you need to make an edition of the
complete works of somebody famous, like so:


Fold that single-folded sheet once more and you'll have an
eight-page-per-sheep book they call a quarto (for 4 leaves), which is
the fancy dictionary or encyclopedia-sized book.


Fold it again and you get an octavo, which is about the size of a
modern hardback, give or take.


Fold it one more time and you get a sixteenmo, or around the size of a
mass-market paperback book.


One more fold gets you thirty-twomo, which is about the size of your
standard notepad (or just a bit bigger than your smartphone), and at
this point you're talking books designed to hide away in your girdle or
hang from a chain around your neck. So if you're going that small, why
not fold it one last time and you get down to a sixty-fourmo, and
impress all the cool kids at the cathedral next week?


So there you go: books are as big as they are because medieval sheep
were as big as they were. Next time you're squinting at your
mass-market copy of Dan Brown's latest wishing the pages were just a
smidge roomier, blame the medievals for not having bigger sheep.

--

*It occurs to me that newer readers--and since the Newt thing, there's
a lot more of you than usual--probably have no idea what Google Penance
is. You see, back in the early days of the blog, most of my pageviews
came from people misdirected here by Google while searching for more
useful sites. In penance for this ill-gotten gain in hits, I
occasionally try to answer whatever question it was that brought the
unfortunate Googler hither.
**Actual search terms: "why are as big as medieval book??"



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