quarto

Quarto comes directly from Medieval Latin in quarto, meaning 'in fourth' — the ablative of quartus (fourth), from quattuor (four). The quarto is the book format produced when a printer's sheet is folded twice: the first fold produces a folio (two leaves, four pages), and the second fold produces a quarto (four leaves, eight pages). The name therefore describes not the book's size but its structure — the number of times the original printing sheet has been folded to produce each gathering of leaves. Because different printers in different periods used different sizes of paper as their standard sheet, a quarto from a 16th-century English press could be a substantially different physical size from a quarto from an 18th-century French press, even though both were technically in quarto format. The format name is a structural description, not a dimensional one.

The literary significance of the quarto format is concentrated most intensely in the history of Shakespeare's plays. During Shakespeare's lifetime and in the decades immediately following his death in 1616, eighteen of his plays were printed individually in quarto format — small, relatively inexpensive booklets that sold for a few pence and were produced by printers working with varying degrees of authorization from the author or his company. These 'Shakespeare quartos' are of uneven textual authority: some appear to have been set from good manuscript sources (the 'good quartos'), while others seem to have been reconstructed from memory by actors or taken down from performance without authorization (the 'bad quartos'). The distinction, established by Victorian scholarship and refined ever since, is still not entirely settled for every play.

The quarto's role in Shakespearean textual history becomes vivid when compared with the First Folio of 1623 — the larger, more authoritative collection of 36 plays published by Shakespeare's colleagues seven years after his death. For plays that survive in both quarto and folio texts, editors must choose between them, reconcile their differences, or present both. Hamlet's quarto texts differ from the Folio in thousands of readings, including the presence of entire scenes in one and not the other. King Lear has a quarto text and a folio text that some editors now treat as two distinct versions of the play rather than variants of a single original. The quarto format — small, cheap, quickly printed — preserved things the Folio did not, and preserved them differently.

Beyond Shakespeare, the quarto was the standard format for a wide range of English print production from the 16th through the 18th centuries: political pamphlets, sermons, plays, shorter poetry collections, and scientific papers. Its size (typically around 9 by 11 inches, though varying by printer) made it more substantial than the duodecimo or octavo formats used for pocket books but more affordable than the folio. As book formats standardized through the 19th century under the pressures of industrial publishing and bookselling conventions, the quarto survived as a named format in publisher's catalogs and library classification systems, even as the relationship between format name and physical production method became increasingly nominal. A modern 'quarto' is a book within a certain size range, named by historical convention rather than by how many times its sheets were folded.