Folio

Ordinarily, additional printed folio sheets would be inserted inside one another to form a group or "gathering" of leaves prior to binding the book.

This will be on the right hand side of the opening of any book composed in a script that is read from left to right, such as Latin (as used in English), Cyrillic, or Greek, and will be opposite for books composed in a script that is read from right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Several such folded conjugate pairs of leaves were inserted inside one another to produce the sections or gatherings, which were then sewn together to form the final book.

In the discussion of manuscripts, a folio means a leaf with two pages, the recto being the first the reader encounters, and the verso the second.

As a result, it became nearly impossible to determine the actual format (i.e., number of leaves formed from each sheet fed into a press).

In the seventeenth century, plays of the English Renaissance theatre were printed as collected editions in folio.

Other playwrights in this period also published their plays in folio editions, such as Ben Jonson's collected works of 1616.