What is a tome? It is worth saying this beautiful word, as the imagination arises the image of an old book in gilded binding. Such publications, as a rule, are quite weighty, have a large page format. This is not surprising, since the first books on sheets of finely crafted animal skin, and then on paper, were written by hand. Not every scribe was able to display small letters; therefore, book volumes turned out to be voluminous and heavy.
The origin and meaning of the word
The term folium has Latin roots and in translation means "leaf". In Russian, the word came from German. Thus, answering the question of what is a folio, we can assume that this is the name of a stack of sheets sewn together, that is, a book. Ancient manuscripts today are reverent awe, have high cultural value and, accordingly, are worth a lot of money.
Print Formats and Technologies
With the advent of printing, folios did not disappear, but the meaning of the term has changed somewhat. In the professional slang of printers, folios began to be called publications having the format of half the standard sheet of paper with an area of 1 square meter.
To make a book, the sheet 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 a little smaller, since the finished book still had to be bound and trimmed for alignment. But all the same, folios printed in a printing way were to match their manuscript brothers.
From antiquity to the present day
When using this word, first of all, we mean old editions. But looking into the modern explanatory dictionary, in an article explaining what a folio is, you can see the following meaning: “a big thick book”. Today, colloquially, a folio refers to any multi-page volume that is several times larger than the standard book format.
Having met on the shelf of a public library or second-hand bookstore a collection of works by Russian or foreign classics published in the Soviet period, you can easily understand what a tome means. For example, 1 volume of the Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language by Dahl (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.
