Book design

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 the renowned typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), 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. 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 the renowned typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), 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. Modern books are paginated consecutively, and all pages are counted in the pagination whether or not the numbers appear. The page number, or folio, is most commonly found at the top of the page, 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. 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 prevents 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). 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.