Book
the general name applied to a printed volume. Printed matter occuples both sides of a certain number of leaves of paper, which are so arranged that, beginning at the upper end of the left side of the first page, one may proceed without dislocation of thought always from left to right till he reach the lower end of the last page. The first page, or recto, of the first leaf or folio, is technically known as a bastard or half title page; the next page, or verso, of the first folio is left blank. Then follows the title page proper, usually with a blank page at the back. In many books there intervenes a preface or introduction, a dedication, and and a table of contents before the main body of the book begins. If any portion of the book has got out of its place, there are two ways by which the true order can be discovered. At the outer corner, or in the center above the reading matter, of each page is a number-1, 2, 3, etc.; this is the pagination or numerical order of pages. At the bottom of certain pages are numbers, 8, 16 and 32 numbers apart, which show the first page of the printed sheet of paper after it has been folded into 8, 16 or 32 pages. A, B, etc., are often used for numerals; and if the book goes beyond the number of letters in the alphabet, the series is continued-AA, BB, etc., or 2A, 2B, etc.
To understand the historic origin of this normal modern book, one must go back to a remote antiquity. The word "book" itself (Saxon boc, German, buch, Dutch, boek) appears originally in Gothic as a plural noun meaning primarily, as is generally believed, the runes inscribed on the bark of separate se branches of the beech tree (Saxon, boc, German, buche, Dutch, beuke) for the purposes of divination, etc. Liber, the Latin equivalent (which has been adopted by all the Romance and Celtic tongues-French, livre, Italian, libro, Gaelic leabhar, Welsh, leor in the Old Red Sandstone period. They and is the source of our English word inhabit the rivers and lakes of temperate and tropical America, some of them growing 3 feet in length, and are used for food. Called also gar pikes.