Take a third sheet: fold it in half, and then in half again, into octavo shape. Take another sheet: fold it in half again, into quarto shape. It should still already be folded in the middle: try to have the coloured side facing in. It was often used for very large volumes. This is the simplest method of forming a quire, but it relies on the sheets being cut independently to almost exactly the same size, which is hard to achieve. Were these leaves to be written up and bound, the gathering would be called a quire. Depending on the number of sheets of paper you have used, it will have either 8 leaves or 10 leaves. Each folded sheet is a bifolium, that is, two folios (leaves), and the whole pile is called a gathering. With a crease in the middle, you now have a pile of bifolia. Once you have a pile of 4 or 5, fold them all in half, putting the short ends together. Take your sheets of paper and place them one on top of another, making sure that you have blank against blank, colour against colour. This is to replicate the difference in colour and texture between the flesh side of the parchment, and the hair side.
You will need several sheets of paper which are either coloured or marked in some way on one side only. The descriptions below are derived from Christopher de Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators (London: British Museum Press, 1992, pp. There are two ways in which this can be done. Most manuscript books contain several quires bound together. This generally involved forming them into quires or gatherings, rather like booklets. Once in possession of the sheets of parchment or paper, a scribe would make them into usable units for writing.
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