So that’s how it works
It can be difficult to explain to an unfamiliar audience how a book is composed of large sheets folded down to the size of the indivdiual leaves. This German translation of Rasselas will make an excellent visual aid in the future, however. It’s a relatively rare example of a book that was never folded and bound, so it still exists in loose sheets just the way they came off the printing press. This book has an octavo format, meaning that there are 8 leaves or 16 pages on one sheet. Having this particular sheet intact also proves something I might have guessed at from the finished product: the first four leaves of the book and the last four were printed together, and would have been cut apart before binding to go in their correct places.
