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The verso is the "back" side and the recto the "front" side of a leaf of paper in a bound item such as a book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. Thus in languages written from left to right (like English), the recto is the right-hand page and the verso the left-hand page. These are terms of art in the binding, printing, and publishing industries, and can be applied more broadly to any field where physical documents are exchanged. The term recto-verso describes two-sided text. The terms are important in the field of codicology, where each physical sheet of a manuscript is numbered and the sides are referred to as recto and verso. Critical editions of manuscripts will often mark the position of text in the original manuscript, or manuscripts, in the style '42r.' or '673vº'. The terms are carried over into printing, recto-verso is the norm for printed books, but was an important advantage of the printing-press over the much older Asian woodblock printing method, which printed by rubbing from behind the page being printed, and so could only print on one side of a piece of paper. The distinction between recto and verso can be convenient in the annotation of scholarly books, particularly in bilingual edition translations.
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