Pagination for Books Composed from Typed Copy

I am attempting to get my print shop ready to handle the printing of my books with hand-set lead type. Of late, I have started using a typewriter. My copy editor seems to like using pencils and pens again. It was a bit different going back to striking keys instead of pressing them, but after forty years, it seemed to come back to me.

My question is one that will need the experience of folks older than me…. and as I am older than dirt, there may be nobody around who can help.

Back in “olden” days, how did a typesetter or editor make estimates in typed copy about pagination of the eventual book? If I had enough type to set the entire book, pagination would take care of itself, but I don’t. I’ll have to print a few pages and then dump the galleys and start over.

Books being books, even a single-signature book, which is what I generally print, has much more complex pagination than those books I wrote in first grade and bound with the teacher’s desk stapler.

Do I need to get enough type to set the entire book/chapter, or is there a standard accepted way to make an estimate?


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For pagination you need to know the average character count and line count. You can set a few lines of type and count the characters on each line to get an average. Set your typewriter margins to that count. Next, decide how many lines will be on a page and only type that many lines per sheet.

Polk, Ralph W. And Edwin W. Polk. The practice of printing : letterpress and offset. 7th ed. (Peoria, IL: Chas. A Bennett Co., 1971.

Have a look at chapter 22, “Layouts and Specifications.”

Generally pretty easily available from online second-hand book sources, and the more I have it around, the more I appreciate it.

The process is called copyfitting. I used to teach it in community college back in the 80’s. Here’s one of several sources of info on the procedure which I found on the web:

However, Sharecropper Press’s procedure is easier and I would go with that method.

The answer to come up with the page lenght etc was done by the designer and copyfitter. If you are able to use a computer then it can be made easier if you type out your book using “Word” or similar in the font and size you hold in metal type and you can adjust the column width / number of lines per page to give you an accurate page extent, which should ideally be divisible by 4. You should almost be able to match the computer text to your hand setting. As for pagination think like Gutenberg, he was only able to print one page at a time but the sheet size was 2 pages to view, therefore 4 pages to a sheet, ie 2 pages on each side of the sheet. Of course this depends a lot on the size of your press. I generally print 2 pages at a time on my windmill and 4 pages at time on the Miehle V50.
Good luck with your books.

The key to copyfitting is knowing how many characters per pica there are in your chosen face. You can estimate that through trial setting, but there are also tables that show cpp for common text faces. Search “Haberule” on eBay and you’ll find a book of tables and/or a copyfitting ruler.

Here is the online book “Typography and Design” from the US Government Printing Office. Start at Chapter 9, Copyfitting, on page 43 (the words highlighted in yellow are because of my Google search, so you can disregard the highlighting). The link will take you to page 45, but start on page 43:

I think I recall that the UK Monotype Corporation used to sell a circular plastic calculator for this. For office use, not in the works. Quick rough method for ordinary not scientific text used the 6 letters per word average aka ‘the nut quad method’, I’ve noticed a lot of published books these days
where someone has got it wrong and theres a few blank pages at the back. It all depends a bit on the available
impositions from your presses AND folding machines. Leading it all one point or two can help with problems!!

Thanks for all the suggestions! Just looking at some of the references, I gather that I have much more to learn about typesetting in general than I had thought.

I understand the concept of kerning and ligatures, but I never dreamed that I might find a lower case “o” character set up that way. I guess I have some reading to do.


Wow!!!!! The suggestions here are fabulous. It’s been at least 50 years since I have dealt with all of this.

You will need to know the size of the parent sheet of paper you will use so you can figure out how many pages you can print on a signature. Multiple signatures complicate things such a page layout for gathering the signatures to bind in the correct sequence.One signature could contain both front AND back of book pages for example. Lots of math but not impossible.

The last thing you want to do is print a form and later find it doesn’t work out in the end. You also do NOT want to be adding or editing out copy once the book has started to print.

I worked in publication production for decades and there are a myriade of details to account for. There was an army of professionals involved in the process - writers, editors, typographers, printers, people who built impositions and locked-up forms, pressmen, and bindery personel.

Start out with four or eight page forms.

You also need to know what typeface you intend to use and what the average character count is for the lenght of line you intend to set.

It ALL boils own to basic math.

ALWAYS fold a dummy book and number each page in pencil. Then unfold the whole thin into flat sheet to see what pages back each other up and if they are ightside-up or upside down. You may be amazed!!!!!!!


Also check out “The Letter-Press Printer: A Complete Guide to the Art of Printing” by Joseph Gould

Available from

One saw overseers in comp rooms by themselves making odd chalk marks on the stone and not letting anyone see what they were doing. As an example they faced a problem with half tone illustrations in pages that just happened to be on the outermost edges of the sheet. Now the best inking i.e. most controllable, on those presses was usually nearer the centre of the sheet, despite oscillating inkers etc. So having first got the OK from the Binders ‘O’ that he could cope with it, the revised impo would be ‘sides to middle’ and very odd it looked when printed. Then cut in half as two sheets, sometimes with a razor blade on an arm added to the press!, and then hand insetted in the bindery. Fiddly, and slow but you got a good quality job.

Once you have written your books, using a pen, typewriter or etc. You need to come up with the size of your book. Is it 5x7, 8x10, 4x6 etc. Once you have the page size, you need to figure in the margins top, bottom and sides. Then you know the length of your text line. Now, the type size and leading has a lot to do with the amount of finish pages of your book.
And how do plan to have the pages put together?

Planning any publication takes a lot of planning. As a person that works at a weekly newspaper, you have to know if the article has photos, art etc before planning a page.

It seems that doing it with LibreOffice is MUCH simpler. WYSIWYG, so all I have to do is send the file(s) to Boxcar and pay for the plates.

This way, not only do I have to do actual math, but I gotta do woodcuts for illustrations. Ah well, if I wanted it to be easy, I would just let someone else do the printing.