Index of entries

The complete register — 23 entries, filed by section and marked with the signature letter used throughout the site.

All entries · signature A to W
Mark	Entry	Section	What it describes
A	The Aldine octavo	Formats	Aldus Manutius put classical texts into pocket format in Venice in 1501 and had Francesco Griffo cut an italic to fit more words on a smaller page.
B	Folio, quarto, octavo	Formats	The format is how many times the sheet was folded, which sets the page size, the price and who the book was for.
C	Continental editions	Formats	Cheap reprints for travellers, and the copyright arrangements that permitted them.
D	Yellowbacks	Formats	Bright boarded reprints sold at railway stalls to be read in one journey.
E	Pickwick in parts	Parts	Chapman & Hall issued it in monthly shilling numbers from 1836, and serialising changed how Dickens plotted — every twentieth page needed a reason to buy the next.
F	The wrapper	Parts	Printed covers carrying advertising, which is part of how the economics worked.
G	What serialisation does to a plot	Parts	Cliffhangers, recaps and a cast that has to stay memorable across a month.
H	Mudie's Select Library	Circulation	Bulk purchase and lending by the volume kept the three-decker alive long after readers wanted it, because the form suited the lender.
I	The three-decker	Circulation	A distribution decision that became a literary form, and collapsed quickly once the libraries stopped buying.
J	Subscription	Circulation	Printing against a list of names, with the names printed in the book.
K	Ten titles at sixpence	Price	Allen Lane priced the first ten Penguins in 1935 at the cost of a packet of cigarettes; the first was André Maurois's Ariel.
L	What a book cost	Price	Prices only mean something against a wage, and the comparison changes the story.
M	Paper and price	Price	Paper is most of the cost, which is why format and price move together.
N	Hand setting	Composition	Type from the case into a stick, justified by hand with spaces, locked into a forme.
O	Hot metal	Composition	Linotype casts a line at a time and changes what a correction costs.
P	The Penguin Composition Rules	Composition	Jan Tschichold imposed a single typographic standard on an entire list in 1947.
Q	Sewn and cased	Binding	Signatures sewn through the fold open flat and survive; the case is attached afterwards.
R	Perfect binding	Binding	Glue instead of thread — cheap, fast, and why some paperbacks shed pages.
S	Boards and cloth	Binding	Publisher's cloth arrives in the 1820s and the binding stops being the buyer's job.
T	Word spacing	The Page	Latin was written scriptio continua; separating words is an invention, and silent reading becomes ordinary after it.
U	Measure	The Page	Line length decides how easily the eye finds the next line, which is what a margin is actually for.
V	Margins	The Page	Proportioned page layouts, and why the outer margin is the widest.
W	Running heads and apparatus	The Page	Headers, folios, footnotes and the index — navigation invented piece by piece.