Printing began in Europe about 1450 with the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany. About a third of book titles printed before 1500 were printed in folio format, 56% as quartos, and 11% as octavos. Two centuries later, Clavel’s term catalogue for 1666-1672 shows a book format distribution shifted toward smaller formats. Among titles in Clavel’s catalogue, only 12% were folios and 16% quartos. The octavo share, at 52% of titles, was much larger than it was two centuries earlier.
The apparent shift to smaller formats across the first two centuries of print probably isn’t an artifact of the limited coverage of Clavel’s term catalogue. Term catalogues from the 1670s include about 27% of titles in the English Short Title Catalogue. The 1666-1672 term catalogue is a relatively large term catalogue. Moreover, larger, more expensive books probably were more likely to come to Clavel’s attention. Such a bias would understate the shift to smaller formats.
About 1670, the format distribution of English books probably differed from that of European books. Britain then had much higher per capita book production than did the rest of Europe other than the Netherlands.[1] To the extent that England had a more developed book economy than the rest of Europe, a consistent interpretation of the statistics means that its books would have been of smaller format than books in the rest of Europe.
Over the next two centuries of print, indirect evidence indicates that octavo titles continued to increase in popularity relative to folios. In the English-language corpus of Google books, the word “folio” peaks in frequency about 1815 at a frequency about 0.002. Octavo, represented by the abbreviation “8vo”, peaks in frequency about 1880 at a frequency about 0.009. Both “folio” and “8vo” had roughly equal frequencies about 1800, while octavos undoubtedly were much more frequent among titles.[2] Format-word frequency, not surprisingly, doesn’t directly map to title-format distribution. Nonetheless, trends in word-format frequencies in books probably are correlated with the salience in print of different book formats.
Plausible supply and demand factors can account for the shift to smaller formats. The broadening of the book market meant lower income customers and more popular books. Lower priced, more popular books tend to have a smaller format. As printing became a well-established technology, the relative cost share of printer’s labor probably fell (de-skilling). The book business over subsequent centuries became a service business not through the redevelopment of printers’ skills, but through the growing importance of editing, copyright management and clearing, and retail channel management functions associated with book publishing.
Update: A highly knowledgeable participants on the SHARP list noted that, over time, increased printing efficiency has been associated with large sheets and more folds. Hence the size of a particular fold-format book has increased over time. Fold-format is thus best interpreted as a relative size, given the typical paper size at a particular date (a range of paper sizes typically has existed at any point in time). Another issue is that format may be used as a size description, rather than an accurate description of the actual folding. That issue too supports the interpretation of relative size at a given point in time.
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Statistics on change of format of books, 1470 to 1670 (Excel version)
Notes:
[1] Buringh and van Zanden (2009), Table 4, estimates per capita annual production of books in Great Britain, 1651-1700, about 170 per thousand residents. The highest figure is for Netherlands (about 260 per thousand residents). For Western Europe as a whole, the per capita annual book production estimate is about 70 per thousand residents.
[2] The word “octavo” has relatively low frequency, as does the folio abbreviation “fo”. Prior to 1700, the word-format frequencies seem much less reliable. Huge spikes occur in the early 1660s for “folio” and in the early 1690s for “8vo”. For some years prior to 1700, no use of either term appears in the Google Books English corpus. Results for the “English Million” corpus are similar to those for the English corpus. Here’s additional information abut Google Ngram Viewer and available corpi.
Reference:
Buringh Eltjo, and van Zanden Jan Luiten. 2009. “Charting the ‘rise of the west’: Manuscripts and printed books in Europe, a long-term perspective from the sixth through eighteenth centuries.” Journal of Economic History. 69 (2): 409-445.