.

All plates should be "guarded," and any "quarter sections," that is,
sections consisting of two leaves, should have their backs
strengthened by a "guard," or they may very easily be torn in the
sewing. Odd, single leaves may be guarded round sections in the same
way as plates.

When a book has been folded, it should be pressed (see p. 87).

There will sometimes be pages marked by the printer with a star. These
have some error in them, and are intended to be cut out. The printer
should supply corrected pages to replace them.

COLLATING

In addition to the pagination each sheet or section of a printed book
is lettered or numbered. Each letter or number is called the "sheet's
signature." Printers usually leave out J W and V in lettering sheets.
If there are more sections than there are letters in the alphabet, the
printer doubles the letters, signing the sections A A, B B, and so on,
after the single letters are exhausted. Some printers use an Arabic
numeral before the section number to denote the second alphabet, as
2A, 2B, &c., and others change the character of the letters, perhaps
using capitals for the first alphabet and italics for the second. If
the sheets are numbered, the numbers will of course follow
consecutively. In books of more than one volume, the number of the
volume is sometimes added in Roman numerals before the signature, as
II A, II B.

The main pagination of the book usually commences with Chapter I., and
all before that is independently paged in Roman numerals. It is
unusual to have actual numbers on the title or half-title, but if the
pages are counted back from where the first numeral occurs, they
should come right.

There will sometimes be one or more blank leaves completing sections
at the beginning or end. Such blank leaves must be retained, as
without them the volume would be "imperfect."

To collate a modern book the paging must be examined to see that the
leaves are in order, and that nothing is defective or missing.

The method of doing this is to insert the first finger of the right
hand at the bottom of about the fiftieth page, crook the finger, and
turn up the corners of the pages with it. When this is done the thumb
is placed on page 1, and the hand twisted, so as to fan out the top of
the pages. They can then be readily turned over by the thumb and first
finger of the left hand (see fig. 5). This is repeated throughout the
book, taking abou