Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, Dal Vladimir

folio

M. lat. book, cut (format) into a single sheet of paper folded in half.

Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. D.N. Ushakov

folio

folio, m. (from Latin folium - leaf).

book in half-sheet format (typically obsolete).

Generally a thick, large-format book (colloquial). These words contain the entire sum of the huge volumes of philosophy. M. Gorky.

Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. S.I.Ozhegov, N.Yu.Shvedova.

folio

A, m. (book). A thick, large-format book (usually an antique one).

adj. folio, -aya, -oe.

New explanatory dictionary of the Russian language, T. F. Efremova.

folio

A book in half-paper format (usually an antique one).

decomposition Thick large format book.

Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1998

folio

FOLIANT (German Foliant, from Latin folium - leaf) is a voluminous large-format book.

Folio

(German Foliant, from Latin folium √ leaf), a voluminous large-format book.

Wikipedia

Folio

Folio- a book in folio format, in which the page size is half the size of a traditional printing sheet. Pages of this format are produced by folding into one fold, approximately correspond to the modern A3 format (about 29x40 cm) and are designated 2° or fo. When printing, there were 4 pages on one printing sheet - two on each side. In a broad sense, a folio refers to any large-format publication.

There were also books in smaller formats: in quarto, with a page size of 1/4 of a typographic sheet, and in octavo, in which the page size was 1/8 of a typographic sheet, and 16 pages were placed on the sheet itself when printed. Folios were characteristic of the early stages of printing and were eventually replaced by books of smaller formats and, with rare exceptions, disappeared from modern printing practice.

Famous tomes include the Gutenberg Bible and the First Folio.

Examples of the use of the word folio in literature.

Closing folio Lao Tzu and placing it next to him on the mat, Arakawa Sensei with both hands takes the massive glasses with smoky frames that he puts on when reading the text, and, carefully placing them in a velvet case, continues to slowly sip tea from a ceramic cup.

“Come over this very minute,” Zach jabbered, tapping the telephone with the edge of his hand. tome,- Bachman doesn’t want to play without you.

The recipe for its complex production was described in numerous alchemical treatises and thick volumes, but in such a form that no one, and often even the alchemist himself, could understand anything.

Carlyle, biography of Amiel and hidden behind the rest volumes, a tattered book about the sexual customs of the Balkan peoples.

Meanwhile, the worker rummages through archives and libraries, absorbs huge folios, looks for bibliographic rarities and curiosities, goes into that little world of the past, of which pale fragments have been preserved on scraps of paper and parchment, and loses the ability to understand the motivating reasons that make living people talk and argue, get excited and become indignant, suffer and rejoice, hope and worry.

But folio could be anywhere - in one of the reading rooms, on a forgotten librarian cart in the corridor, in the custodian's table.

In the meantime, the Dominican Fathers are eagerly studying folios and manuscripts, especially those taken from Spain: after the expulsion of the Moors by the zealot of the faith Ferdinand the Catholic, many works of these infidels remained in the country, full of heretical fabrications and false scientific evidence, disputing the evidence of the Holy Scriptures about the creation of the world, the structure of the Universe and the rotation of the stars.

All these years of exercise, countless days of difficult study under the stern and vigilant eye of Clotagorb, all these many long evenings devoted to reading and taking notes of the ancients volumes, finally bore fruit.

To do this, he forced the boy to study heavy folios old opera scores, write music based on texts by ancient Italian librettists, depict in sounds long-silent passions unknown to the boy, sometimes stiltedly and pompously expressed in a foreign and completely incomprehensible language.

Through long dark corridors, through a spacious courtyard, the senior scribe led Rong Mei into a rickety outbuilding and introduced him to an ancient man, covered with green not even fluff, but moss, bending low at the spacious window with a magnifying glass in his hand over the ancient tome in a cover lined with red Sichuan brocade.

When I realized that falling on a pile of broken chairs and a one-string kithara would not be entirely pleasant, all I had left in my hands was a moldy folio.

I look, and here they are carrying the score, not the usual one, but real folio, a book, framed in lynx skin, and at the end of the tail there is a brush, and a handkerchief is tied to the brush, for wiping off the profuse sweat after the final!

We developed a font - runic, the letters seem to be knitted by a girl’s hand, the paper is textured, fleecy, like a tapestry, this is not a volume of poetry, this is - folio!

Walking silently in his thick-soled shoes, Kuchmienko entered Carnal's office, closed the door behind him, cheerfully shook his shoulders, darted his eyes back and forth, did not see anything new for himself: the same piles of drawings, piles of newsletters on Carnal's long table, thick folios, xerographic prints of some abstracts, which for some reason the academician swallowed dozens of daily.

The layer of fat under the cheeks and in other places under the skin moved, following unknown currents - a powerful layer that, without fear of unemployment, could be studied and described in piles of ridiculously serious scientific journals and academic software volumes two or three young institutes and a dozen sharashka offices.

What is a tome? When we pronounce this word, we have associations with past centuries, with antiques, museum values, with ancient, richly decorated expensive books, with the first printer John Gutenberg. But not many people know what the exact lexical meaning of the word “folio” is.

Dictionary definition

The word "folio" originates in Latin, where it has the form "folium". From there it was borrowed into German, in which it became “foliant,” which means leaf. Moreover, the Latin word refers to both a plant leaf and a book leaf.

What is a tome, according to the dictionary definition? If you follow Ushakov’s explanatory dictionary, it turns out that this word has two meanings that are close to each other.

• According to the first of them, a folio is an obsolete typographical term for a book that has a half-sheet format.

• The second meaning is a colloquial word meaning any book that is thick and has a large format.

Special format book

Take a closer look at what a tome is, as a typographic term. I wonder what kind of half-sheet format this is? First, let's figure out what a typographic sheet is. And this is a paper medium with an area of ​​one square meter.

It is quite easy to imagine, since it exactly corresponds to the format of a modern newspaper when unfolded. This format is called “A0” and has dimensions of 841 x 1189 (in millimeters). Thus, the folio will have a size equal to half a standard printing sheet.

The folio format is called in folio. Its page is approximately the size of a modern A3 sheet (29 x 40 cm). It has two designations, one of them is “2°”, the second is “fo”. One printing sheet contains four pages of this format - two on each side. Thus, the meaning of the word “folio” is closely related to the size of ancient books.

Folding and Creasing

The in folio size was obtained after the printing sheet was folded in half using methods such as folding and creasing.

Folding is a typographical term derived from the German verb "to fold." It denotes the action of folding sheets into a notebook of a given volume and format. In this case, it is necessary to observe the sequence of arrangement of each of the pages in order to obtain a book or brochure. The resulting fold line is called a fold.

If the paper is very thick, then creasing was carried out before folding. This concept comes from the German "to go around". Creasing is the operation of applying grooves in the form of a straight line to paper. It is carried out in the case where there is a possibility of damage to an already applied image if a regular fold is used.

Creasing protects the folded area from cracks in the ink layer; with its help, printed products are given a more neat appearance. If previously different machines were used for each of the operations considered, today (since 2002) equipment is used that combines these two functions.

Creation of tomes

As can be seen from the above, the appearance of tomes is closely related to printing technology. When they were created, two pages were first printed on one standard printing sheet, first on one side and then on the other. After this, the sheets were folded according to the methods described above. A number of printed and folded sheets were stitched and bound.

The first printed books were large for other reasons. At the very beginning of book printing, they tried to make them look like handwritten ones in order to withstand competition with them, since they were more familiar to people. The handwritten editions had impressive dimensions - both in length, and in width, and in thickness. After all, it was difficult for a copyist to write neatly by hand, and besides, a large book was difficult to steal. We must not forget that books were very highly valued at that time.

First volumes

When considering the question of what a tome is, it would be appropriate to mention one of the most famous tomes - the Gutenberg Bible. It is also known as the 42-line Bible, published by the German pioneer John Gutenberg in the first half of the 1450s.

It was a printed version of the Vulgate - the Commonly Accepted Bible, which was a Latin translation of the Holy Scriptures. According to tradition, the publication of this volume is considered the beginning of European book printing. Although in fact this book is not the first incunabula (printed before 1501). But among other first editions it stands out for its very good quality of design.

What is a tome? As soon as you say this beautiful word, the image of an old book with a gilded binding appears in your imagination. Such publications, as a rule, are quite weighty and have large page formats. This is not surprising, since they wrote on sheets of finely tanned animal skin, and then on paper, by hand. Not every copyist could write small letters, so the book volumes turned out to be voluminous and heavy.

Origin and meaning of the word

The term folium has Latin roots and means “leaf”. The word came into Russian speech from the German language. Thus, answering the question of what a tome is, we can assume that this is the name of a stack of sheets sewn together, that is, a book. Even today, ancient manuscripts evoke awe, have high cultural value and, accordingly, are worth a lot of money.

Print formats and technologies

With the advent of printing, tomes did not disappear anywhere, but the meaning of the term changed somewhat. In the professional slang of printers, folios began to be called publications that have a format of half a standard sheet of paper with an area of ​​1 square meter.

To make a book, the sheet was folded in half, and the text printed on it formed four pages. It is easy to calculate that such volumes had a size of 1000 x 500 mm or slightly smaller, since the finished book still had to be bound and the sheets trimmed for alignment. But still, the printed volumes were comparable to their handwritten counterparts.

From ancient times to the present day

When using this word, we primarily mean old publications. But looking at a modern explanatory dictionary, in the article explaining what a tome is, you can see the following meaning: “a big thick book.” Today, in colloquial speech, a tome means any multi-page volume, several times the size of a standard book.

If you come across a collection of works by Russian or foreign classics published during the Soviet period on the shelf of a public library or used bookstore, you can easily understand what a tome means. For example, volume 1 of Dahl’s “Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” (1956) has 700 pages, the height of the book is 255 mm, the width is 195 mm, and the weight is more than 2 kilograms.

The word "folio" in modern sound

If you enter a query in any Internet search engine about what a tome is, then in addition to links to the interpretation of the term, you can find the addresses of various firms and companies whose names contain this word. This name is given to a printing house in Kazan, a book publishing house in St. Petersburg, and the House of Books in Moscow. The Foliant application for mobile phones and smartphones is designed for reading e-books.

Under this elegant name, many enterprises are registered that are in one way or another connected with the production or sale of printed materials. For example, the Foliant store in Astrakhan sells greeting cards, holiday posters, postal envelopes and other similar goods.