Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components and elements of a book into a coherent unit. In the words of renowned typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), book design, "though largely forgotten today, [relies upon] methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve, [and which] have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied". [1] Richard Hendel describes book design as "an arcane subject", and refers to the need for a context to understand what that means. [2]
Modern books are paginated consecutively, and all pages are counted in the pagination whether or not the numbers appear (see also: blind folio). The page number, or folio, may be found at the top or the bottom of the page, often flush left verso, flush right recto. The folio may also be printed at the bottom of the page, and in that location it is called a drop folio. Drop folios usually appear either centered on each page or flush left verso and flush right recto. [3] The book contains the main text and a number of paratexts that comprise all of the additional matter that is included in the book. [4]
Front matter (or preliminaries; shortened to "prelims") comprises the first section of a book, and is usually the smallest section in terms of the number of pages. Front matter pages are traditionally numbered in lower-case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, v, etc.), which obviates renumbering the remainder of a book when front matter content is added at the last moment, such as a dedication page or additional acknowledgments. Page number is omitted on blank pages and display pages (i.e., such stand-alone pages as those for the half title, frontispiece, title page, colophon, dedication, and epigraph), and it is either omitted or a drop folio is used on the opening page of each section of the front matter (e.g., table of contents, foreword, preface). [3] Front matter generally appears only in the first of a multi-volume work, although some elements (such as a table of contents or index) may appear in each volume. It can get in the way of reading a book for even the most devoted fans of an author. [5]
The following table defines some common types of front matter, and the "voice" (or point of view) in which each can be said to be given:
Name | Voice | Purpose |
---|---|---|
Half title | Publisher | A mostly-blank page at the front of the book block which precedes the title page and contains only the title (omitting the subtitle, author, publisher, etc. found on the full title page) and occasionally includes some slight ornamentation. The title traditionally appears on the page as a single line in capital letters, but modern half title pages may be scaled-down versions of the typography from the full title page. The half title page faces a blank verso or an endpaper. [6] |
Frontispiece | Author or publisher | A decorative illustration on the verso facing the title page. It may be an image related to the book's subject or a portrait of the author. Frontispieces have become less common, with a list of the author's previous works or other titles in a multi-author series frequently taking the place of the frontispiece. |
Title page | Publisher | Repeats the title and author as printed on the cover or spine, often using typographic elements carried over from either the cover design or from the rest of the book's interior. Title pages may also include the publisher's logo accompanied by the city and/or year of publication. [6] |
Copyright page | Publisher and printer | (Also known as Edition notice) Technical information such as edition dates, copyrights, translations used, and the name and address of the publisher or printer. It usually appears in modern books on the verso of the title page, but in some books is placed at the end (see Back matter). |
Dedication | Author | A dedication page is a page in a book that precedes the text, in which the author names the person or people for whom he/she has written the book. |
Epigraph | Author | A phrase, quotation, or poem. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison, or to enlist a conventional context. [7] |
Table of contents | Publisher | This is a list of chapter headings and sometimes nested subheadings, together with their respective page numbers. This includes all front matter items listed below, together with chapters in the body matter and back matter. The number of levels of subheadings shown should be limited, so as to keep the contents list short, ideally one page, or possibly a double-page spread. Technical books may include a list of figures and a list of tables. In French language books, the table of contents is often part of the back matter rather than the front matter. |
Foreword | Some person other than the author | Often, a foreword will tell of some interaction between the writer of the foreword and the writer of the story, or a personal reaction and significance the story elicited. A foreword to later editions of a work often describes the work's historical context and explains in what respects the current edition differs from previous ones. |
Preface | Author | A preface is generally the author recounting the story of how the book came into being, or how the idea for the book was developed. This is often followed by thanks and acknowledgments to people who were helpful to the author during the time of writing. |
Acknowledgments | Author | Sometimes part of the preface rather than a separate section in its own right, or sometimes placed in the back matter rather than the front, it acknowledges those who contributed to the creation of the book. |
Introduction | Author | A beginning section which states the purpose and goals of the following writing. |
Prologue | Narrator (or a character in the book) | Usually present in fiction or narrative nonfiction, the prologue is an opening to the story that establishes the setting and gives background details, often from some earlier or later timeframe that ties into the main one. As such, it is generally considered part of the body in modern book organization (cf. Chicago Manual of Style). |
The structure of a work—and especially of its body matter—is often described hierarchically.
The first page of the actual text of a book is the opening page, which often incorporates special design features, such as initials. Arabic numbering starts at this first page. If the text is introduced by a second half title or opens with a part title, the half title or part title counts as page one. As in the front matter, page numbers are omitted on blank pages, and are either omitted or a drop folio is used on the opening page of each part and chapter. On pages containing only illustrations or tables, page numbers are usually omitted, except in the case of a long sequence of figures or tables. [3]
The following are two instructive examples:
The back matter, also known as end matter, if used, normally consists of one or more of the following components:
Name | Voice | Purpose |
---|---|---|
Epilogue | The narrator (or a character in the book) | This piece of writing at the end of a work of literature or drama is usually used to bring closure to the work. |
Outro | The conclusion to a piece of work; this is considered the opposite of the intro. This term is more commonly used in music. | |
Afterword | The author, or some other real person | An afterword generally covers the story of how the book came into being, or of how the idea for the book was developed. |
Conclusion | Author | |
Postscript | ||
Appendix or Addendum | Author | This supplemental addition to a given main work may correct errors, explain inconsistencies or otherwise detail or update the information found in the main work. |
Glossary | Author | The glossary consists of a set of definitions of words of importance to the work. They are normally alphabetized. The entries may consist of places and characters, which is common for longer works of fiction. |
Bibliography | Author | This cites other works consulted when writing the body. It is most common in non-fiction books or research papers. |
Index | Publisher | This list of terms used in the text contains references, often page numbers, to where the terms can be found in the text. Most common in non-fiction books. |
Colophon | Publisher | This brief description may be located at the end of a book or on the verso of the title page. It describes production notes relevant to the edition, such as typeface used, and may include a printer's mark or logotype. [9] |
Postface | ||
Author | Author | A brief, single page-long biography of the author, sometimes accompanied by a photograph of them. It is written in the third-person narrative. [10] |
Arabic numbering continues for the back matter.
The front cover is the front of the book, and is marked appropriately by text or graphics in order to identify it as such (namely as the very beginning of the book). The front cover usually contains at least the title or author, with possibly an appropriate illustration. When the book has a soft or hard cover with dust jacket, the cover yields all or part of its informational function to the dust jacket.
On the inside of the cover page, extending to the facing page is the front endpaper sometimes referred as FEP. The free half of the end paper is called a flyleaf. Traditionally, in hand-bound books, the endpaper was just a sheet of blank or ornamented paper physically masking and reinforcing the connection between the cover and the body of the book. In modern publishing it can be either plain, as in many text-oriented books, or variously ornamented and illustrated in books such as picture books, other children's literature, some arts and craft and hobbyist books, novelty/gift-market and coffee table books, and graphic novels. These books have an audience and traditions of their own where the graphic design and immediacy is especially important and publishing tradition and formality are less important.
The spine is the vertical edge of a book as it normally stands on a bookshelf. Early books did not have titles on their spines; rather they were shelved flat with their spines inward and titles written with ink along their fore edges. Modern books display their titles on their spines.
In languages with Chinese-influenced writing systems, the title is written top-to-bottom. In languages written from left to right, the spine text can be pillar (one letter per line), transverse (text line perpendicular to long edge of spine) and along spine. Conventions differ about the direction in which the title along the spine is rotated:
In texts published or printed in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, the spine text, when the book is standing upright, runs from the top to the bottom. This means that when the book is lying flat with the front cover upwards, the title is oriented left-to-right on the spine. This practice is reflected in the industry standards ANSI/NISO Z39.41 [11] and ISO 6357., [12] but "... lack of agreement in the matter persisted among English-speaking countries as late as the middle of the twentieth century, when books bound in Britain still tended to have their titles read up the spine ...". [13]
In many continental European countries, where the ascending system has been used in the past, the descending system has been used in recent decades, probably due to the influence of the English-speaking countries, such as Italy, Russia, Poland and elsewhere.
In many continental European and Latin American countries, the spine text, when the book is standing upright, runs from the bottom up, so the title can be read by tilting the head to the left. This allows the reader to read spines of books shelved in alphabetical order in accordance to the usual way left-to-right and top-to-bottom. [14]
The spine usually contains all, or some, of four elements (besides decoration, if any), and in the following order: (1) author, editor, or compiler; (2) title; (3) publisher; and (4) publisher logo.
On the inside of the back cover page, extending from the facing page before it, is the endpaper. Its design matches the front endpaper and, in accordance with it, contains either plain paper or pattern, image etc.
The back cover often contains biographical matter about the author or editor, and quotes from other sources praising the book. It may also contain a summary or description of the book
Books are classified under two categories according to the physical nature of their binding. The designation hardcover (or hardback) refers to books with stiff covers, as opposed to flexible ones. The binding of a hardcover book usually includes boards (often made of paperboard) covered in cloth, leather, or other materials. The binding is usually sewn to the pages using string stitching.
A less expensive binding method is that used for paperback books (sometimes called softback or softcover). Most paperbacks are bound with paper or light cardboard, though other materials (such as plastic) are used. The covers are flexible and usually bound to the pages using glue (perfect binding). Some small paperback books are sub-classified as pocketbooks. These paperbacks are smaller than usual—small enough to barely fit into a pocket (especially the back pocket of one's trousers). However, this capacity to fit into a pocket diminishes with increasing number of pages and increasing thickness of the book. Such a book may still be designated as a pocketbook.
Some books such as Bibles or dictionaries may have a thumb index to help find material quickly. Gold leaf may also be applied to the edges of the pages, so that when closed, the side, top, and bottom of the book have a golden color. On some books, a design may be printed on the edges, or marbling or a simple colour applied. Some artist's books go even further, by using fore-edge painting. Pop-up elements and fold-out pages may be used to add dimensions to the page in different ways. Children's books commonly incorporate a wide array of design features built into the fabric of the book. Some books for preschoolers include textured fabric, plastic on other materials. Die-cut techniques in the work of Eric Carle are one example. Clear or reflective surfaces, flaps, textiles and scratch-and-sniff are other possible features.
A basic unit in book design is the page spread. The left page and right page (called verso and recto respectively, in left-to-right language books) are of the same size and aspect ratio, and are centered on the gutter where they are bound together at the spine.
The design of each individual page, on the other hand, is governed by the canons of page construction.
The possible layout of the sets of letters of the alphabet, or words, on a page is determined by the so-called print space, and is also an element in the design of the page of the book. There must be sufficient space at the spine of the book if the text is to be visible. On the other hand, the other three margins of the page, which frame the book, are made of the appropriate size for both practical and aesthetic reasons.
The print space or type area determines the effective area on the paper of a book, journal or other press work. The print space is limited by the surrounding borders, or in other words the gutters outside the printed area.
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images. Modern books are typically in codex format, composed of many pages that are bound together and protected by a cover; they were preceded by several earlier formats, including the scroll and the tablet. The book publishing process is the series of steps involved in their creation and dissemination.
The codex was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically, the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term "codex" is now reserved for older manuscript books, which mostly used sheets of vellum, parchment, or papyrus, rather than paper.
This list contains only complete, printed English-language editions of The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. It is not for derived or unprinted works such as screenplays, graphic novels, or audio books.
A hardcover, hard cover, or hardback book is one bound with rigid protective covers. It has a flexible, sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened. Modern hardcovers may have the pages glued onto the spine in much the same way as paperbacks. Following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk.
An advance reading copy, advance review copy, advance reader's edition, advance copy, or a reader's edition is a free copy of a new book given by a publisher to booksellers, librarians, journalists, celebrities, or others, or as a contest or school prize, before the book is printed for mass distribution.
Recto is the "right" or "front" side and verso is the "left" or "back" side when text is written or printed on a leaf of paper in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet.
The dust jacket of a book is the detachable outer cover, usually made of paper and printed with text and illustrations. This outer cover has folded flaps that hold it to the front and back book covers; these flaps may also double as bookmarks.
In typography and word processing, a page header is text that is separated from the body text and appears at the top of a printed page. Word-processing programs usually allow for the configuration of page headers, which are typically identical throughout a work except in aspects such as page numbers.
The Codex Mendoza is an Aztec codex, believed to have been created around the year 1541. It contains a history of both the Aztec rulers and their conquests as well as a description of the daily life of pre-conquest Aztec society. The codex is written using traditional Aztec pictograms with a translation and explanation of the text provided in Spanish. It is named after Don Antonio de Mendoza (1495-1552), the viceroy of New Spain, who supervised its creation and who was a leading patron of native artists.
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from folio, to quarto (smaller) and octavo. Historically, these terms referred to the format of the book, a technical term used by printers and bibliographers to indicate the size of a leaf in terms of the size of the original sheet. For example, a quarto historically was a book printed on sheets of paper folded in half twice, with the first fold at right angles to the second, to produce 4 leaves, each leaf one fourth the size of the original sheet printed – note that a leaf refers to the single piece of paper, whereas a page is one side of a leaf. Because the actual format of many modern books cannot be determined from examination of the books, bibliographers may not use these terms in scholarly descriptions.
In literary interpretation, paratext is material that surrounds a published main text supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or its interpretation by the public. Paratext is most often associated with books, as they typically include a cover, title, front matter, back matter footnotes, and many other materials not crafted by the author. Other editorial decisions can also fall into the category of paratext, such as the formatting or typography. Because of their close association with the text, it may seem that authors should be given the final say about paratextual materials, but often that is not the case.
Traditional Chinese bookbinding, also called stitched binding, is the method of bookbinding that the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese used before adopting the modern codex form.
A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. Beyond the familiar distinction between hardcovers and paperbacks, there are further alternatives and additions, such as dust jackets, ring-binding, and older forms such as the nineteenth-century "paper-boards" and the traditional types of hand-binding. The term bookcover is also commonly used for a book cover image in library management software. This article is concerned with modern mechanically produced covers.
The canons of page construction are historical reconstructions, based on careful measurement of extant books and what is known of the mathematics and engineering methods of the time, of manuscript-framework methods that may have been used in Medieval- or Renaissance-era book design to divide a page into pleasing proportions. Since their popularization in the 20th century, these canons have influenced modern-day book design in the ways that page proportions, margins and type areas of books are constructed.
The endpapers or end-papers of a book are the pages that consist of a double-size sheet folded, with one half pasted against an inside cover, and the other serving as the first free page. Thus, the front endpapers precede the title page and the text, whereas the back endpapers follow the text. Booksellers sometimes refer to the front endpaper as FEP.
The term "folio" has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book made in this way; second, it is a general term for a sheet, leaf or page in (especially) manuscripts and old books; and third, it is an approximate term for the size of a book, and for a book of this size.
Page numbering is the process of applying a sequence of numbers to the pages of a book or other document. The number itself, which may appear in various places on the page, can be referred to as a page number or as a folio. Like other numbering schemes such as chapter numbering, page numbers allow the citation of a particular page of the numbered document and facilitates to the reader to find specific parts of the document and to know the size of the complete text.
An intentionally blank page is a page that has no content and may be unexpected. Such pages may serve purposes ranging from place-holding to space-filling and content separation. Sometimes, these pages carry a notice such as "This page was intentionally left blank." Such notices typically appear in printed works, such as legal documents, manuals, and exam papers, in which the reader might otherwise suspect that the blank pages are due to a printing error and where missing pages might have serious consequences.
Bookbinding is the process of building a book, usually in codex format, from an ordered stack of paper sheets with one's hands and tools, or in modern publishing, by a series of automated processes. Firstly, one binds the sheets of papers along an edge with a thick needle and strong thread. One can also use loose-leaf rings, binding posts, twin-loop spine coils, plastic spiral coils, and plastic spine combs, but they last for a shorter time. Next, one encloses the bound stack of paper in a cover. Finally, one places an attractive cover onto the boards, and features the publisher's information and artistic decorations.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to books.