What it means
In book design a folio is the printed page number — not the page itself. Folios sit in the head margin beside the running head, or centred at the foot, and they carry the reader's sense of place through the book.
A few conventions govern them. Front matter uses lowercase roman numerals; the main text starts at arabic 1, traditionally on a recto. A blind folio is a page that is counted in the sequence but carries no number — title pages, part titles, blanks. A drop folio is a number moved to the foot on a page whose head is empty, such as a chapter opener. Odd numbers always fall on rectos, even numbers on versos, which is why a chapter that must start on a recto may force a blank page before it.
The word has a second, older meaning: a sheet folded once, giving the large "folio" format of Shakespeare's First Folio.
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