Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III THE PHYSICAL BOOK We take books so much as a matter of course and our use for them is so largely for the particular share the author has had in their creation, that we rarely stop to consider their physical features. It is important, nevertheless, to know something of the make-up of a book in order to use it carefully and intelligently. How a Book is Put Together.? Take a sheet of paper, ordinary typewriter size, and fold it as follows: first, end to end, making two leaves and four pages; second, end to end, making four leaves and eight pages; Illustration I third, end to end, making eight leaves and sixteen pages. Then take a paper knife and cut the two top folds and the two lengthwise folds on the right, just as you would cut the leaves of a book. The result is a group of leaves called a section. Now, if you will examine your text- Illustration 2 book you will see that it is composed of a number of these sections which have been sewed together along their folded edges. In the majority of books that are now manufactured this sewing is done by a machine and the result is not so durable as when a book is properly sewed by hand. After the sections have been drawn together in this way, a piece of thin cloth, wider than the back by an inch on either side, is pasted over the back. This cloth protects the stitches and also provides hinges for attaching the book to its cover. A piece of strong paper, just the width of the back, is then pasted over the cloth. The cover, which has previously been made, is now laid open flat; the back of the book is fitted into the back of the cover, and inch strips of cloth, which were left extending beyond either side of the back, are now pasted down to the sides of the cover. The outside half / illustration 3 of...