It could say ‘-4.’ Or it might say ‘+1’ if a leaf has been added.” A formula can also tell you if leaves are missing. “The formula ‘1(8), 2(6), 3(4)’ means that quire one has eight leaves-that is, four sheets folded together-and quire two has six leaves, and quire three has four leaves. How do collation formulas work, exactly? Porter offers this example. These quires are then sewn together to form the textblock. Each sheet used to make a quire becomes two leaves, which are physically connected through the center of the quire. Book-shaped manuscripts, which are known as codices, are made up of sheets of paper or parchment that have been stacked together and folded to make what’s called quires. “A collation formula is the traditional way of describing the structure of a codex,” she explains. Thankfully, the math wasn’t as scary as I initially anticipated. Formulas? That sounds pretty math-y to me. So when Dot Porter, curator of digital research services in the Penn Libraries Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, started to tell me about manuscript collation formulas, I got worried. I like to joke that one of the reasons I decided to study history is that it was unlikely to involve very much math.
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