As a group, career booksellers are bound to a reputation of being somewhat contrary, difficult and argumentative, especially when gathered. While we at The Book Shop don't disagree with the observation, we're also pretty sure that it's the nature of the work that is responsible for this estimation. How could it be otherwise when ours is such a doubt-filled occupation, when deep at the root of each of us lies a professional uneasiness, when the more thoughtful of us can't help but privately wonder if we're doing our jobs right.

For, there is no International Congress of Bookoligists. There is no Academy Bibliographique. There is no PhD of Bookselling. There is no single universally agreed-upon manual of best practices, no one final authoritative glossary of book terminology. Bookselling has been a trade passed-down from one generation to the next, one individual at a time, and as such, no two students of the trade have ever agreed on every aspect of it.

Conflicting guides and tradecraft glossaries (no, we're not going to mention any authors or titles as debate is not our goal here) have been published over the generations, over the centuries, each in its own way an attempt at unification, each in opposition to those that have come before, none of which have gained universal adherence.

As there is no one authority on book vernacular, the trade is understandably comprised of a spectrum of grumpy people, ranging from those who constantly second-guess themselves, to those ever-ready to defend themselves, all of whom are dead certain that they won't make it through a whole day without someone disagreeing with them over book language. And, naturally, those who are most adamant that their understanding is the one and only truth are rarely correct.

Perhaps no other constituent of bookselling has divided booksellers as consistently as the panoply of names given to different book sizes. Over the last few hundred years there has been so little agreement that, unless cribbed, size charts rarely even resemble one another. Then the internet came along and suddenly there are as many different definitions of folio as there are sides of the global warming discussion.

Yet, we must pay attention to the book buyers brought to us by the internet. These are not the bibliophiles of old, to whom we addressed our quarterly catalogs, and of whom we could safely expect a certain book background. No, the trade has changed. If we were to write 16mo, 16to, 16vo, trigesimo-segundo, or super royal pott demy crown in our descriptions, we'd not only be wasting space, we'd most likely be frustrating today's buyers.

The following chart, almost guaranteed to have something in it to offend someone, is an adaptation of the book size chart which we began using in the early 1960s, meant to eliminate no longer current terminology and adjusted to the characteristics of books being produced today. Gone are references to how many leaves or pages of text are produced from how many times a sheet of a certain size is folded, as book binding is no longer tied to sheets of handmade paper approximately 19" x 25". The names given to each size have graduated to refer to finished sizes of books, rather than component parts.