Count the Pages

I once sent a book to print with one page too many.

The number of pages in a traditional book isn’t random. Printers use large sheets of paper that each fold to make a section of 16 pages. Any page count that didn’t fit into multiples of 16 was far more expensive to print.

I still remember the sequence of possible extents for a book: 32pp, 48pp, 64pp, 80pp, 96pp, 112pp, 128pp, and 144pp. (In kids publishing, we used a lot of 32pp and 48pp lengths for younger readers, and 144pp for large encyclopedias.)

If you had a book with a section of color images in the middle, that section was 16pp long.

Some of you might remember seeing books with blank pages at the end with a heading that read “For the reader's own notes.” They weren’t left blank for the reader. They were left blank because it would cost too much to take them out of the book.

With my book, the production director said, “This book has 129 pages.”

I had stupidly added an extra page of index.

Cutting a single page from a three-page index would be a huge amount of work, so I made an executive decision. I cut the single page glossary from the book to take us back to 128 pages.

The book went off to print. And I don’t think anyone noticed.