Tome

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A tome bound in pigskin and decorated with blind embossing (1806)

A tome ( lat. Folium 'sheet') is a book in folio format. The folio format is a book format in which the size of the page results from the fact that the original sheet of paper , which corresponds to the dimensions of the traditional Roman parchment sheet , is only folded once ( folium ). It is often about the size of a DIN A3 sheet (roughly 29 × 40 cm).

Smaller books, on the other hand, were referred to as quart (4 ^o ) or octave (8 ^o ) bands. Very small books were called Duodez volumes in ancient parlance (12 ^o ). This division according to certain book spine heights comes from the custom, which has been widespread since the Middle Ages , of arranging books in libraries according to their size for practical reasons. It was not until the Age of Enlightenment that a thematic classification system (Winckelmann / Francke, after Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Michael Francke ) became established in libraries.