I searched for a thread on this and couldn’t find one but it may be the search terms I was using.
I’ve found a lot of books, particularly recently, are leaving the ragged unfinished edges on the pages. You get kind of a sawtooth pattern with the leaves this way.
So my question for you is why are some publishers doing this? I don’t care for it since it looks ratty but then I’m not usually buying books for their aesthetics. Is it a cost saving measure? Does skipping a trim step let them print books significantly faster? Is it just a stylistic choice? Are they trying to avoid paper cut lawsuits?
To my knowledge it harkens back to the days when books were hand-crafted. It is a style choice these days.
Minor hijack - some old books are collected because of the artwork painted onto the edges - when closed, they might have a landscape or a design painted on them…
This and the pages are easier to turn in a ragged edge. Each page instead of being exactly behind the previous is slightly off to make for easier turning of pages.
I disagree with this. Uniform edges are easy to turn one page at a time because, when the book is open, the spine bows and the page edges slide uniformly away making it easy to select a single page.
With ragged pages, it is impossible to “riffle flip” through by single pages and when coming on the downside of the sawtooth pattern the top page hasn’t slid far enough from its neighbor to easily select it for turning.
That, and the ragged pages hold dust more easily and get dirty.
Back in the day, many books were sold uncut. That is, the printed quarto was folded and bound in, without having the pages cut. You used a paper knife to cut it as you went. This of course left an edge that was more torn than cut.