Size
Beginning in 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 may be impossible to determine the actual format (i.e., the number of leaves formed from each sheet fed into a press). The term "octavo" as applied to such books may refer simply to the size of the book. The use of the term "octavo" as applied to such books refers to books which are generally between 8 to 10 inches (200 to 250 mm) tall, the most common size for modern hardbound books. More specific sizes are denoted by reference to certain paper sizes as follows:
- Foolscap octavo (6¾" by 4¼") (170 mm x 108 mm)
- Crown octavo (7½" by 5") (190 mm x 126 mm)
- Demy octavo (8¾" by 5⅝") (221 mm x 142 mm)
- Royal octavo (10" by 6¼") (253 mm x 158 mm)
Read more about this topic: Octavo
Famous quotes containing the word size:
“Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second- guessing in The New York Review of Books.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“It is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together. As things stand at present there is nothing much the Texans can do about this, and ... they are inclined to shy away from the subject in ordinary conversation, muttering defensively about the size of oranges.”
—Alex Atkinson, British humor writer. repr. In Present Laughter, ed. Alan Coren (1982)
“The obese is ... in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)