Such leaves are, as pedants delight in pointing out, unopened, not simply uncut.John Carter’s wonderfully opinionated ABC for Book Collectors provides the following definition: UNOPENED This means that the leaves of a book issued entirely untrimmed (and therefore having the folding of its component sections still intact at the top and fore-edges) have not been severed from their neighbours ...
However, you should be sure to distinguish between “untrimmed” and “uncut” pages—the latter refers to a book made up of a folded leaf that has not been cut. Accordingly, all of the pages of an “uncut” book cannot be opened. ... Let’s spend a moment on gilt. In the rare book world, this term refers to the application of gold or a ...
Learn the correct way to open uncut pages in an antique book, preserving the natural look of the paper. This technique works best for books that were not tri...
Antiques Board. Home Forums > Antique Forums > Books > "Unopened" vs "uncut" pages. Discussion in 'Books' started by DonZ, May 27, 2018. DonZ New Member. I have a ten-volume first edition set of books by John Muir, circa 1916, which I purchased a while back. The seller advertised them as an "untrimmed" set which I took to mean that the page ...
Sometimes I’ll encounter a book (usually an oldish one) with an uncut page or two. (FYI, multiple book pages are printed on a large sheet, then folded into a little bundle called a signature; all the signatures are bound together in sequence, then three of the four sides of the pile are trimmed to cut away the top, bottom and right-side folds. If a fold lands inside the trim edge it stays ...
Uncut pages were common to Victorian Era and earlier books, artifacts of the bookbinding practices of the day. As Spellerberg explains in Reading & Writing Accessories, long sheets of paper were folded numerous times to form a “signature” of pages or “leaves,” which would be printed on both sides.Signatures would be printed, collated, and then bound (which usually meant “sewn”) to ...
Sometimes you can even find old books with a few uncut pages, indicating those pages were never actually read. An old-fashioned untrimmed book will present an unkempt fore edge, consisting of ragged deckle edges of the original handmade sheet of paper, as well as pages that were manually cut open by the reader with a paper knife. Grab & go!
Since the pages are uncut, there evidently hasn't been a first reader, which means it's an 150 year old unread book. It might be rare to come by so that's why we've decided to post this. Since it's the Netherlands the book has gotten wet in the past, so some pages are slightly damaged.
I’m finally getting around to reading it (I have a long backlog of books in my reading list) and I discovered about 70% of it has uncut pages. As a personal rule, I don’t annotate or mark antique books. But I’ve never had a book with uncut pages before, and although I could easily get a pdf online, I had hoped to read it physically.
Uncut or untrimmed pages are unusual, since books were issued unbound, or in a temporary binding for the purchaser to have bound up to the mid 19th-century development of the publisher’s binding. A modern example of a book showing the edges of the handmade sheet of paper is SPEC Zaina E.73 no.5 – the difference from the trimmed copy at SPEC ...
Uncut: A book whose margins have not been trimmed. Typically, a binder would slice off the edges of a book’s text block after binding, thereby getting a nice smooth edge to all the leaves. If a book was rebound often, this inevitably meant that the margins would get smaller and smaller until in the most extreme cases, some of the text itself might be cut off.
Old books were sometimes sold with uncut pages that the recipient would then have to open themselves. The edges of leaves can be rough and uneven in books where the leaves have been cut open by hand. All the gatherings are bound to make a text block, a single sheet is folded to make a front endpaper and another single sheet is folded to make a ...
As for this book before me: books with uncut pages (“unopened pages” is the proper name, but too weak for a title) are not rare, but not common, and no more are being made. The easiest way to part such pages is with the edge of an index card; I have boxes of “Super-Dex” Rotary Cut cards, from when such things were still made in Brooklyn ...
Incidentally, the correct term, as moreotherstuff notes, is "unopened" - see Carter's ABC for Book Collectors under 'Uncut', which means, more obviously, untrimmed. There was a time when collectors preferred wide, original page margins, which were often trimmed (cut) by binders.
Okay to cut uncut pages in old books? General Questions
I do not want to read them on line or anything else. I like the feel of a book and can get lost in it for hours. One of my old old teachers once said "A book is a friend you can always count on." Thank goodness I took a speed reading course years ago. It takes me about 2 hours to read the average 700 page book especially if I had read it before.
Regarding the uncut pages:In the past, many books were printed on large sheets of paper that were folded to create multiple pages. After binding, these sheets were often not trimmed properly, leaving some pages still joined together at the edges. This was especially common in books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
