The French colonial notaries
most likely kept their records together in the traditional, folder-thick increments known
as liasses (“bundles,” from the verb lier, to bind). The Spanish notaries, on the other
hand, seem to have created their records with the specific intention of putting them into
some sort of book format. For example, whereas the French notaries treated their folios
and their acts discretely – often concluding an act at the top or middle of a sheet’s recto
and leaving the remainder of the recto and entire verso of the folio as blank, wasted space
– the Spanish notaries followed one act immediately with the next, keeping them virtually
*contiguous from recto to verso, from folio to folio*, and generally leaving as little blank
space between acts as possible.

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Note added at 23 hrs (2012-05-04 17:34:04 GMT)
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ooops, I put the link to the source text under 'Example sentences' by mistake