Among this type of general Europe-wide trends, there are of course local differences, and for example in Turku (fig.???) (and Finland that was part of Sweden at the time) the rise of octavo comes much later than in Sweden in general. This was due to the fact that the main part of the documents printed in Finland were official documents, pamphlets and theses. If we look at the fractions of formats in Turku, another way of saying this would be that printing in Turku only takes off in the later eighteenth century whereas in Stockholm hand press printing industry seems to have reached a different level of maturity earlier (fig. ??). The simplest explanation for the success of octavo format is that it was particularly suited for smaller books that could be carried around and read practically anywhere, whereas quarto (and folio) formats were more commonly used in governmental and academic documents; pamphlets and in larger books alike, especially in the earlier centuries [FOOTNOTE: about relationship between books and pamphlets, see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and pamphleteering in early modern Britain, Cambridge University Press, 2003) **]. We have analysed the relevance of the rise of octavo with respect to book printing in the case of "history" publishing earlier [CITE: DOI:
http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10112) **]. Of course, larger formats in book printing carried certain prestige also in the eighteenth century even when reading started to be partly removed from stately mansion libraries, becoming more equal and the price of the book turned out to be a decisive factor for dissemination of ideas [CITE: Allan, D. W. (2013). Politeness and the Politics of Culture: An Intellectual History of The Eighteenth-Century Subscription Library.
Library History,
29, 159-169. Allan, D. W. (2008).
A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England. London: The British Library. Allan, D. W. (2008).
Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740-1830. Routledge.
Towsey, Mark (2010). Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland 1750-1820. Leiden and Boston: Brill. **] When considering quarto and octavo publications, it is quite telling that David Hume (1711-1776) wanted his
History of England to be printed in quarto sized fine-paper six-volume set in late 1760s (as it had appeared earlier), but the editions that were actually published after 1767 until Hume's death (including the 1778 posthumous edition) are octavo editions in eight volumes. Octavo editions might have lacked the exclusivity and finesse of heavier tomes with large margins that connoisseurs might have preferred for aesthetic reasons, but it was particularly the cheaper and smaller formats, octavo and duodecimo, that changed the nature and relevance of printing in the later part of the eighteenth century.