One method for doing this is to place the points on any line in space and to draw the edges as curves each of which lies in a distinct halfplane, with all halfplanes having that line as their common boundary. An embedding like this in which the edges are drawn on halfplanes is called a book embedding of the graph. This metaphor comes from imagining that each of the planes where an edge is drawn is like a page of a book. It was observed that in fact several edges may be drawn in the same "page"; the "book thickness" of the graph is the minimum number of halfplanes needed for such a drawing.