Med 8vo: the Abandonment of Format Description

It's still quite common to see the first edition of The Silmarillion—like many regular sized hardbacks—described as ‘octavo’ (abbrev. 8vo, oct, 8°). Occasionally (rarely) this might be prefixed with words like crown, demy, large, medium, etc. I'm not entirely sure if I understand what individual booksellers (in 2024) are described when using these terms, but I assume they're referring to book size only. 

In contemporary promotional material from 1977, GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN (GA&U) described The Silmarillion to the trade as ‘Med 8vo’ (medium octavo). Terms like octavo—folio, quarto, sextodecimo, etc—while critical for determining size, are properly describing format; ‘medium’ is where the calculation of size begins. 

GA&U promotional pack [1977] book detail

Assume GA&U were using Med 8vo in the fuller sense here. Medium, then, refers to the size of the whole (unfolded) printed sheet, sometimes called the broadside. Octavo refers to the number of times this sheet was folded, in this case folded three times to produce eight parts (leaves) in respect to the original; leaves being printed on both sides, this is a gathering of sixteen pages. [Unrelated: but note, too, the pre-publication page count of 360; the final page count would be 368.]

BILLING (3RD gathering) octavo example

Lists and tables, giving final book sizes based on sheet size and format, are often encountered in books dealing with this subject. Perhaps this is where some of the confusion lies: technical (trade) terms, requiring explanation, are seen in the final analysis to relate only to the book's dimensions; the format part is overlooked or forgotten. 

Medium octavo—in respect to that final book size—is variously defined in the literature. Douglas Cockerell's Some Notes on Bookbinding (OUP 1929) gives the final book dimensions as 9½ x 6 inches (uncut); Hugh Williamson's Methods of Book Design (OUP, 1956 [2nd Ed. 1966]) states 9 x 5¾ (uncut). Williamson's definition (in respect to size only) of medium octavo is reasonably close for The Silmarillion (after cutting); Cockerell's not so much. Although common broadside sheet sizes were standardised, rather confusingly many non-standard variant sizes existed. Nonetheless, together, these two elements indicate both the size and format of the book being described. The latter element, of format, has been entirely lost in modern bookselling usage. 

Some Notes on Bookbinding (p. 91)

Even as early as the 1950s, when writing his ABC for Book-Collectors (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), Carter was already talking about booksellers having largely abandoned the use of this ‘unnecessarily technical’ terminology in their catalogues; the aim (in this forum) being merely ‘to give a reasonably clear idea of the size of the book offered’ (pp. 89–90). Carter's characterisation of booksellers hardly seems accurate. Booksellers may have abandoned the meaning, but they continued to use the same terminology, terminology which was understood to have another meaning and was still being used by printers, paper manufacturers, bibliographers, typographers, etc. This deliberate unsophistication presumably developed over several years in bookselling circles, but surely caused confusion to those who understood the terminology in the original sense. I think it fair to question, for example, whether it was correct to assume that collectors of older books wouldn't have had a passing interest in basic collation detail at this time.

That booksellers continue to use this terminology today (without explanation) is problematic only for those who consider the meaning to be anything other than the book's dimensions. Which is probably a dwindling few. I attempted—not entirely seriously—to acknowledge this here, by describing a 1977 copy of The Silmarillion as ‘Octavo (size)’; that is by not describing format. While it can (and is) argued that determining the format of modern books is tricky, it strikes me that collating older books and establishing their format—which booksellers have (historically) done—isn't easy either. The accusation of  ‘dumbing down’, and everything this implies, is hard to avoid. 

In Descriptive Bibliography (St Paul's Bibliographies / Oak Knoll Books, 1993) Hammond & Anderson avoid ambiguity by simply stating the measured dimensions of the books they're describing. The Silmarillion entries are given as:

 

WILLIAM CLOWES & SONS (A15a) 22.0 x 14.1 cm.

BILLING & SONS (A15b) 22.1 x 13.9 cm. 

These measurements are page-block sizes.

Case sizes are about 228–229 mm.

Format is dealt with by collation formula. These formulae tell us (correctly) that the format of CLOWES and BILLING printed copies are not the same; CLOWES copies are bound (bar one gathering) in 32-page gatherings, BILLING copies 16-page gatherings. The different Realms map (plate) placement is also described in the collation. From this it should be clear that out of the two main printers of The Silmarillion (1977), CLOWES and BILLING, only BILLING copies are actually octavo format. We might describe these as different binding states.

Two BILLING copies

Above is a BILLING page-block (pulled, mended, and marked for sewing); twenty-three 16-page gatherings. An entirely sensible format for the binding of a 368 page book. I don't, unfortunately, have a decent image of a CLOWES page-block to hand for visual comparison.

POSTSCRIPT: Having said all this, I looked to Tanselle—bibliographer and author of Descriptive Bibliography (2020), a work I used more extensively and cited here—for affirmation (of my basic understanding), only to find my simplistic binary notion of format-versus-size (the premise of this entire post) to be woefully unnuanced. The bibliographical history of ‘format’, what this term is understood to mean, is long and complicated; and a settled understanding of these concepts a more recent historical development I than appreciated. Tanselle devotes many pages to exploring these concepts (pp. 215–258).