The vellum is well prepared and of medium thickness.  The leaves are bound in a modern pliable vellum binding with three blank vellum fly-leaves in front and seven in back, all modern.  On the inside of the front cover is the book-plate of John Pierpont Morgan, showing the Morgan arms with the device:  Onward and Upward.  Under the book-plate is the press-mark M.462.

[Sidenote:  Ruling]

There are twenty-seven horizontal lines to a page and two vertical bounding lines.  The lines were ruled with a hard point on the flesh side, each opened sheet being ruled separately:  48v and 53r, 49r and 52v, 50v and 51r.  The horizontal lines were guided by knife-slits made in the outside margins quite close to the text space; the two vertical lines were guided by two slits in the upper margin and two in the lower.  The horizontal lines were drawn across the open sheets and extended occasionally beyond the slits, more often just beyond the perpendicular bounding lines.  The written space was kept inside the vertical bounding lines except for the initial letter of each epistle; the first letter of the address and the first letter of the epistle proper projected into the left margin.  Here and there the scribe transgressed beyond the bounding line.  On the whole, however, he observed the limits and seemed to prefer to leave a blank before the bounding line rather than to crowd the syllable into the space or go beyond the vertical line.

[Sidenote:  Relation of the six leaves to the rest of the manuscript]

One might suppose that the six leaves once formed a complete gathering of the original book, especially as the first and last pages, folios 48r and 53v have a darker appearance, as though they had been the outside leaves of a gathering that had been affected by exposure.  But this darker appearance is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that both pages are on the hair side of the parchment, and the hair side is always darker than the flesh side.  Quires of six leaves or trinions are not unknown.  Examples of them may be found in our oldest manuscripts.  But they are the exception.[1] The customary quire is a gathering of eight leaves, forming a quaternion proper.  It would be natural, therefore, to suppose that our fragment did not constitute a complete gathering in itself but formed part of a quaternion.  The supposition is confirmed by the following considerations: 

  [Footnote 1:  For example, in the fifth-century manuscript of Livy
  in Paris (MS. lat. 5730) the forty-third and forty-fifth quires are
  composed of six leaves, while the rest are all quires of eight.]