History

Like short men on the shoulders of giants, we at printerpress are trying to slightly extend the reaches of a tradition of bookmaking dating back to around 100AD and the invention of the codex book. (Codex refers to any book consisting of multiple sheets bound down a single side.)
A book as we understand it, is made up of series of pages, each a single side of a sheet. These sheets are grouped into signatures or sections, which are then combined. Traditionally, in the west, pages are read from left to right, top to bottom. A sheet is read from front to back, as is the book and the signatures that comprise it. These western books are bound down the left hand side.
Most of this seems fairly obvious to anyone who has ever handled a book. Of course you read a book from front to back, a page from left to right. These observations seem as plain as the nose on your face, but in many parts of the world these rules are not the norm. What is commonly referred to as the eastern book, due to its establishment and use in the Middle East and Asian regions of the world, is read in quite the opposite fashion, being bound on the right and read from right to left. Before the codex, scrolls were the most dominant book form, read top to bottom, the “page” as long as was required to fit the entire text.
But I digress. My goal here is not so much to explain the entire history of the codex book in both the East and West, but to give you the user an idea of how the books provided here at printerpress stem from this rich history.
Earlier I mentioned that books are made up of sections, their pages divided into equal groups commonly referred to as signatures, these signatures much like smaller books or pamphlets, bound together to make a larger book. By breaking a book down into sections of folded paper like this, bookmakers could save time and resources. Instead of binding each page to the next, they could instead bind every eight or sixteen page section to the next, drastically reducing the amount of work they had to do.
This dividing of the book also made sense in regards to printing. If you could print multiple pages on each side of a large piece of paper, fold that paper down, trim it and then bind it into a book as a single section, the amount of prints required to produce a book of any significant size could be drastically reduced.
The patterns and folds used to determine how many pages could be printed on a single sheet of paper and in what order the pages would be laid out on the paper, are referred to as signature folds. There are three common types of signature folds. The folio fold, a single piece of paper folded in half, creating four pages, often used to make larger books, or portfolios. The quarto fold, where the paper is folded twice, creating a signature of eight medium size pages. And the octavo fold, where the paper is folded three times, creating a section comprised of sixteen small pages. In the later two cases the signatures are usually bound together and their edges are trimmed, opening up the interior pages for reading.
Here at printerpress our books are also broken down into sections, each one divided into what we refer to as chapters. Each chapter is of equal length, eight pages, all of which are printed on a single side of one sheet of paper. By utilizing the previously described octavo fold, but by printing on only a single side of the sheet of paper, not going through the trouble of binding or trimming, our chapters end up consisting of 8 pages, the interior of the book remaining blank. By avoiding printing on both sides of the paper, we limit the number of problems encountered by our readers in regards to printing and alignment. Our chapters also require no adhesives or binding of any kind, their folds holding them together. Through printing folding, and one simple cut the printerpress chapter is ready to read. The following folding guide explains this simple process.