LJS is constructed from large (9.5" x 26") bifolia sheets of goat-skin parchment.  With each goat skin yielding a single bifolio, it would have taken at least 92 goats to produce this text.  While the Cistercian Order was deeply embedded in an agricultural way of life and presumably had hundreds of goats in their care, LJS 184 would still have required a large proportion of their overall resources -- indicating, perhaps, the Etymologies' importance to the manuscript's original owners at Poblet Monastery.  The quality of parchment used diminishes as the text progresses, with the smaller, more irregularly shaped leaves being reserved for the last fifty-odd pages of the MS. 

Goat-skin parchment produces a pristine, shiny white flesh side.  The scribe seems to chosen the shiniest, whitest piece of parchment for fol. 1r.

Unfortunately, the scribe does not seem to have properly prepared his parchment with pumice to rough up its flesh side, causing the ink eventually to flake off and gather in the gutters.  During the conservation process, the pages were coated with gelatin mixture to bind the remaining ink to the leaves (Quandt, n. 8). 

The parchment for LJS 184 was prepared for writing with pricking marks along the outer edges, most likely made with an awl.  Each page was then ruled with plummet (a lead "pencil"), giving each page a usable writing area of two 42-line columns. 

At some point, the leaves were trimmed: the marginal pricking marks are no longer visible, and the scribe's instructions for the rubricator have been partially cut off in some places.  

Although Quandt suggests that this trimming occurred "immediately after the book was sewn and the boards were attached," the date on the pastedown and the mis-numbering of Book X suggest to me that the text had another binding prior to receiving its wooden boards, a conclusion supported by Quandt's analysis its spine, and was probably trimmed after this earlier binding was attached (see Binding).