One-twentieth of aream of paper; a collection of twenty-four or twenty-five sheets of paper of the same size and quality, unfolded or having a single fold.
1882, James Edwin Thorold Rogers,A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, volume 4, page592:
Under the year 1533 we are told that the ream contained twentyquires.
[…] and we must accept the fact that all those good novels,Villette,Emma,Wuthering Heights,Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a fewquires of paper at a time upon which to writeWuthering Heights orJane Eyre.
2004, Jason Glenn,Politics and History in the Tenth Century: The Work and World of Richer of Reims, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,→ISBN, page140:
We saw above that the fourthquire consists of ten folios, two of which (folios 29 and 31)Richer added to a quaternion (folios 23 to 28, 30, 32). Most of the folios Richer added to his manuscript supplement, elaborate, or amend text that he had already composed in the codex. In thisquire, however, Richer wrote around the added folios as if it was thequire he added to them, not the converse. Indeed, if we were to remove folios 29 and 31, there would be neither grammatical nor narrative continuity between the original folios of thequire which would face each other, that is, between folios 28v[erso] and 30r[ecto] on the one hand, or folios 30v and 32r on the other.
(bookbinding) A set ofleaves which arestitched together, originally a set of four pieces of paper (eight leaves, sixteen pages). This is most often a singlesignature (i.e. group of four), but may be severalnested signatures.
quire (third-person singular simple presentquires,present participlequiring,simple past and past participlequired)
(bookbinding) To prepare quires by stitching together leaves of paper.
1870, William White,Notes and Queries, volume42:
Now, in the first folio volume of 1616, the paging, signatures, andquiring are continuous and regular throughout.
1938,The Dolphin: A Journal of the Making of the Books, number 3:
This is a natural point at which to ask whyquiring went out of fashion.
1976, Alfred William Pollard,Alfred William Pollard: A Selection of his Essays:
By means of these smooth pages we can mostly see how the modern binder made up the book, but whether in doing this he followed the originalquiring is quite another matter.
Madam, myself have lim'd a bush for her, And plac'd aquire of such enticing birds, That she will light to listen to the lays, And never mount to trouble you again.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: / There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st / But in his motion like an angel sings, / Stillquiring to the young-eyed cherubins; / Such harmony is in immortal souls; / But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing-the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent andquiring heart of the late spring night.
Units of paper quantity on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
