Front matter

Book design is the art of incorporating the content, , format, design, and sequence of the various components and elements of a book into a coherent whole. In the words of Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold (d. 1974), book design, "though largely forgotten today, methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve, have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books, these rules have to be brought back to life and applied." Richard Hendel describes book design as "an arcane subject", and refers to the need for a context to understand what that means.

Front matter, or preliminaries ("prelims", for short), is the first section of a book, and is usually the smallest section in terms of the number of pages. The pages are numbered in lower-case Roman numerals. Each page is counted, but no folio or page number is expressed, or printed, on either display pages or blank pages. Front matter generally only appears in the first volume in a multi-volume work, although some elements (such as a table of contents or index) may appear in each volume.

The following table will help distinguish between some of the different types of front matter:

The structure of a work (and especially of its body matter) is often described hierarchically.

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:

The front cover is the front of the book, and is marked appropriately, by text and/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 and/or author, with possibly an appropriate illustration.

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. It is customary for it to have printed text on it. In texts published and/or printed in the United States and the United Kingdom, the spine text, when vertical, runs from the top to the bottom, such that it is right side up when the book is lying flat with the front cover on top. In books from continental Europe, vertical spine text traditionally runs from the bottom up, though this convention has been changing lately. 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.

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