One of the most confusing aspects of book collecting for folks just beginning to build a private library is coming to grips with the often very specialized terminology that booksellers use to describe books. That is why a considerable number of this blog's past posts have been devoted to explaining many of these terms in "plain English" (along with appropriate illustrations).
Recently, while visiting the website of independent bookseller Henry Hain III in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, we came across an image that rather nicely summarizes, as graphically as possible, some of the terms with which this blog has concerned itself over the past nine months (as with most of the images used on this blog, if you click on the image itself you should see a larger version of it):
Another problem for novice book collectors is figuring out what size book is referred to when booksellers describe a book as folio, octavo, etc. Again, Hain has a nice image to help one grasp the concepts:
In fact, Hain's own glossary of book collecting terms is better than what is available from some of the major booksellers organizations, and we strongly commend it to your use (so much so that we have added a permanent link to it under Glossaries of General Book & Literary Terms in the left-hand column of this blog).
For folks who are more comfortable with text than with images, follow this link to a text description of book sizes from TomFolio's own excellent glossary, a permanent link to which you also will now find residing in the left-hand column of this blog under Glossaries of General Book & Literary Terms....
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