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I have a question about the boldfaced part in the following. I know "mehr oder minder" means "more or less," but I don't know what it means when it combines with "viele."
mehr oder minder viele bedruckte Bögen Papier, die zusammengeheftet sind und von einem festen Umschlag aus Pappe schützend umgeben werden
If "mehr oder minder" is translated literally into English, then "mehr oder minder viele" ("more or less many") does not make sense in English.
German mehr oder minder, mehr oder weniger does not have the idiomatic meaning of English more or less, i.e. "mostly", "almost", "approximately".
Therefore, the meaning is the literal one: "to a higher or lower degree or quantity", which in the context mehr oder minder viele (bedruckte Bögen) yields eine unterschiedliche Anzahl (von bedruckten Bögen) "a varying quantity or degree of printed sheets".
In English, you had to rephrase as a more or less high number of …
In German you can simply use viele for that purpose.
I think some "compare and contrast" with the English expression would help.
I think the main problem is that "more or less" does not mean that in English; it means (per Wiktionary) either "approximately" or "almost". It doesn't work to combine this with an unspecific modifier such as "high", "many" or "large"; you wouldn't say "approximately large" or "almost large".
The expression is covered in the DWDS entry under mehr and they give the definition "in bestimmtem, gewissem Maße" = "to a certain extent/to some extent". It's also covered in the entry for minder, but there they only give examples with no definition. One of the examples is "mit mehr oder minder großem Erfolg".
From the examples I've seen, I think the best translation would be "to varying extent" or "to some extent" depending on the situation. For example (from Die Ziet via DWDS)
Nach Schätzungen ist jeder zweite Deutsche zwischen 52 und 64 Jahren mehr oder minder stark von dieser Linsentrübung betroffen; in der Altersgruppe ab 65 Jahre wird sie sogar bei 90 Prozent aller Menschen vermutet.
According to estimates, every second German between the ages of 52 and 64 is affected by this clouding of the lens to some extent; in the age group from 65 years it is even suspected in 90 percent of all people.
I'd like to note as well that "more or less" is common in spoken English, while "mehr oder minder" seems to be more common in written German.
Also note that these are fixed expressions, not quite idioms but also not to be taken too literally. German and English seem to have changed the literal meaning in different ways and this seems to be the cause of most of the confusion.
The phrase "mehr oder minder" is (sorry: more or less) a synonym for "mehr oder weniger". As you say, this corresponds to the English "more or less".
In my opinion the combination
mehr oder minder viele (or mehr oder weniger viele)
is an infelicitous wording. The word "viele" means "many" and it does not make much sense to specify it by "mehr oder weniger". The phrase mehr oder weniger viele covers a range from a great many to not too many. Actually the word viele is strongly relativized by mehr oder minder. In other words, it is (sorry: more or less) meaningless.
