How far back do these traditions go? From all the Latin I take it was well before the printing press and back in the day of scribes and vellum bound tomes. Always interested in the practical reasons for why certain traditions were established.
So I think, but would have to research some, that even when book bindings were hand-sewn, they were often made in signatures instead of individual leaves because of the ease of binding that way (fewer pieces to sew together).
In traditional offset printing (on a web press, not a sheet-fed or digital press), your front matter usually would consist of an even half-signature (32 pages) or, more likely, a quarter-signature (16 pages) so it could be printed fully separately from the rest of the book block, and then bound together. Although, since the front matter is characteristically on the same stock as the rest of the block, there's no need really now that it's so easy to repaginate a composed book on the fly with DTP software.
It used to be that repaginating/refolioing was a whole endeavor and so the front matter was paginated separately from the main text because it was more likely to reflow, to have things added/removed late in production, or to be supplied late in production, and you would not want to have to refolio the whole book every time something in the front matter changes. Hence why we don't paginate the end matter with a different numbering system -- nothing gets disturbed if that part reflows.
How far back do these traditions go? From all the Latin I take it was well before the printing press and back in the day of scribes and vellum bound tomes. Always interested in the practical reasons for why certain traditions were established.
So I think, but would have to research some, that even when book bindings were hand-sewn, they were often made in signatures instead of individual leaves because of the ease of binding that way (fewer pieces to sew together).
In traditional offset printing (on a web press, not a sheet-fed or digital press), your front matter usually would consist of an even half-signature (32 pages) or, more likely, a quarter-signature (16 pages) so it could be printed fully separately from the rest of the book block, and then bound together. Although, since the front matter is characteristically on the same stock as the rest of the block, there's no need really now that it's so easy to repaginate a composed book on the fly with DTP software.
It used to be that repaginating/refolioing was a whole endeavor and so the front matter was paginated separately from the main text because it was more likely to reflow, to have things added/removed late in production, or to be supplied late in production, and you would not want to have to refolio the whole book every time something in the front matter changes. Hence why we don't paginate the end matter with a different numbering system -- nothing gets disturbed if that part reflows.