Got Medieval discusses it. The short answer? Sheep.
From the piece...
Medieval books were the size they were because medieval sheep were the size they were. Remember, paper wasn't the original medium for page-creation. Medieval books were constructed of parchment, which is a fancy word for sheep or goat skin (and primarily sheep skin, because there were a lot more of them around). So take your average sheep: Skin her and trim off the curvy parts where her legs used to be, and you get one gigantic sheet of parchment, way too big for most bookmaking purposes.
But that's fine, because you can fold it in half and you'll get a huge but manageable pair of leaves (four pages counting front and back), which you can gather with a lot of other similarly sized leaves and make a "folio"-sized book, the sort of giant monstrosity of a book that you have to leave spread out on a table before you in order to read and which, not surprisingly, they don't tend to make too many of these days. It's good size for a fancy atlas, but since we've all got Google Earth, who needs that?
1 comment:
Very cool--I had no idea that was how it works! Thanks for sharing this. (But, I can't help but feel bad for all those skinned sheep!)
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