Book folding

Book folding is the stage of the book production process in which the pages of the book are folded after printing and before binding.

Until the middle of the 19th century, book folding was done by hand, and was a trade. In the 1880s and 1890s, book folding machines by Brown and Dexter came onto the market, and by the 1910s hand-folding was rare, with one publisher declaring them to be "practically obsolete" in 1914.

The folding process is also necessary to produce print products other than books—for instance mailings, magazines, leaflets etc.