Les Paul Tail piece

Hi. The tail piece of a les paul is held in place by two bolts. These cradle the tail. I bought a Les Paul off the net and the screws which hold the tailpiece werent screwed all the way in. This means the tailpiece is off the wood, raised. And the strings running over the bridge arent at such a sharp angle as the go over and hook into the tailpiece. Thus by raising the tailpiece the strings are straighter!
Why has this been done? What are the advantages of doin this? Is this the norm or a preference?

It's been my experience that raising the tailpiece makes the LP type guitars easier to play as far as string bending is concerned, their are a couple of different schools of thought on this, in theory the guitar may sustain better with the tailpiece down against the body, better mechanical coupling transmits vibration better etc, etc..., and the other side of the debate is that as long as the string angle is around 14 degrees or more the string has enough coupling at the bridge that sustain isn't really affected, I tend to go with the latter veiw since the vibrating length of the string is between the nut and the bridge and I think that any vibration transmitted to the body would go thru the bridge studs, easy to screw it down to the body and see if you like it better, .............

Know of any online articles on this? Am really interested now

I really don't know of any online articles, you may be able to find it in articles concerning Gibson set-ups, but no telling how many you'll have to wade thru to see much discussion about it, maybe a search on Dan Erlewine might turn up something on it, but I don't know how much you'll find on this subject........ This was one of the first problems I ever had to solve when I bought my first decent electric guitar, it sounded great but bending up a whole step was killing me, my friend had a Les Paul and his just felt like butter, I looked his guitar over and saw his tailpiece was raised up a bit, mine was screwed down tight to the body, I raised mine up and shazam, bent as smooth as his, his Les Paul was brand new (80) and hadn't been fooled with since it had been purchased as far as I know, I've really never went around and inspected a bunch of LP's to see if there was much difference in the tailpiece height, and as far as I know the factory doesn't mess with the tailpiece when they do the inital set-up............