“Even if you are a voracious reader you might not know about uncut pages. Sometimes the fore edge of a book (the edge away from the spine) is not trimmed properly and the pages are not cut apart, It’s obvious, isn’t it, that you can’t read a book that way. It used to be a fairly common situation.
Back in the days when they made real books, that is, ones with sewn-in signatures … well, let’s talk about how they made books. Books are printed on large sheets of paper, about the size of newsprint. Several pages are printed on each sheet. In fact, there is a specific number of pages per sheet, depending on the size of the book. For a book known as an octavo (octavo meaning eight) the printed sheet was folded three times, yielding eight sheets or sixteen pages (two pages per sheet, counting front and back).
Each group of sheets folded like that is a signature and the book was assembled by stacking all the signatures in order, sewing them together, gluing on a back cloth and attaching it to the end papers, which were attached to the front and back covers. But before the covers were attached, the page edges were trimmed. If the original sheet folding wasn’t too accurate, the trimming might miss a folded edge or two and when you came to that page, you found two pages joined together at both front and back. The solution is to take your penknife (which every gentleman carries) and slit the pages so you can continue reading. (Sometimes books were deliberately uncut, leaving to the reader the task of cutting all the pages. There was a time when cutting pages was considered a great pleasure.)
The point of this harangue is that if you find a book with uncut pages, you can be sure that it has never been read. I am currently reading “A Farmer’s Year” by H. Rider Haggard, published in 1899 and it is full of uncut pages. Thus, this particular volume has been waiting for 111 years for me to come along and read it.
I can’t explain the delight of cutting book pages. Particularly with an old book, it is something of a ritual of awakening – allowing the book to fulfill its destiny. To find an uncut page is suddenly to see the book in a new light. This is a beautiful young girl who has lain under an enchantment, maybe for a century, waiting for her prince to awaken her with … [well], with his penknife, in this case.”
Additionally, the rest of Willis Cook’s article can be found here
Evelyn Snyder
August 13, 2022 — 9:24 am
I have a 1903 edition de luxe vol x The Life Works of Guy de Maupassant with several (not all) uncut side pages. Should I just cut and read? Is there a value to leaving uncut and imagine what is going on in those pages (carefully ballooning them out to read what I can)? Is a 1903 book worth anything? I paid $6.95 each over 20 years ago for this and three other Maupassant books (Walter Dunne publisher).
Jaron J
September 28, 2022 — 3:08 pm
Thank you for posting this. I am interested in reading the rest of the Willis Cook article, but have been unable to access it via the Jackson Herald site despite multiple attempts to set up an account with them. Do you have a PDF/text copy you could send me?