Thanks to kilroyscarnival for pointing to the solution and to Guessed for suggesting I include a file as this is my first posting in the forum.

It turns out changing the vertical alignment to Top did the trick. I have no idea why it was set to bottom. I should say that the original text was written in Greek around 1985 using PCwrite that was very popular before MS Word dominated. Perhaps this may have something to do with the strange setting when the text file was imported to Word. Plus there was a machine translation from Greek to English. Now I can continue the editing process.

Regarding the page size, 6 x9 inches is the most typical book size, at least in the US. The nearest standard size is C5