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This excellent piece of typography was found on designersbookshop.com, a company that creates tools for designers to use in making compositional/typographic grids.
Notice there are 6 columns here, 3 per page. The outside columns are left blank to serve as the margins. The gutter between the two pages is thin, as the 2 text blocks on either side are pushed together in the middle. What you start to see is that there are 3 designs occuring here: Each page has 2 text columns that are perfectly balanced on the page. Not only that, looking at everything together you see that the entire 2 page spread is harmoniously arranged.
The spread is not crammed full of information: at least half of the surface is untouched by ink. This allows the design to “breathe.” It makes the content on the page more important and eye catching. Even though you probably can’t read this language, you want to sit and look at it. That is perfect design: It needs no improvement.
Our books today traditionally have a single wide text column on each page. I wouldn’t mind seeing some of those broken in two like this. Of course, magazines make use of this extensively, using 2 and 3 columns per page. But magazines also tend to over-crowd.
I’d actually say that there are 2 columns on each page, and that they are aligned as per Tsicholde’s essay (reprinted in English in “The Form of the Book”) – draw a diagonal line from the bottom left of the double-page spread to the top right, and see how it meets the top-right corner of the text on the recto (right-hand) page. Similarly a diagonal on the left page only meets the bottom-left corner.
The wide margins are to give the page balance and beauty as a physical object, and to make the book more expensive (since hundreds of sheep had to die to make it).
Liam