The earliest known form of (paper) bookbinding in China is "butterfly binding"

(Chinese: ), which was invented during the Song Dynasty (around 1000 C.E.).
Single-printed folio pages were pasted together and folded in a stack, creating a
book in which pairs of printed pages alternated with blank ones. This was followed
by "wrapped back binding", in which the folios were complied with the image on the
outside, and the open ends at the spine. Stitched binding developed from wrapped
back binding in the sixteenth century.[