What does the word "gatefold" mean?
Sure, I know what it is (the whole internet is very eager to tell me what it is), but where does it come from?
The "gate" part that is, I can guess the "fold" part. But I can't find any sense of the word "gate" that would pertain to a way of folding paper.
Best Answer
In her blog on Design Context, Sophie Wilson details the various types of folds and provides the following useful illustration:
Regular people call pretty much all of those foldouts, but bookmakers use gatefold as a particular term of the trade. The simple reason that it’s called a gatefold is because it folds out like a double-gate — that is, one with two separate “doors” where one opens to the left and the other to the right.
This article on “What you need to know about gate fold leaflets” by Saxoprint in the UK explains the origin of the term in this way:
That page has many diagrams and examples of various kinds of foldouts.
Apparently, the record industry took to calling simple folds gatefolds, even though they were not such. In this article on how to fold a brochure from PrePressure, they draw a distinction:
So it appears that the record people call just about anything folded a gatefold, but this is not how the term is used by bookbinders. For example, the Wikipedia article on Allman Brothers Band’s Eat a Peach album calls this image from the article “gatefold art”:
Notice there is just a single fold.