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Book Parts
What would an anatomy of the book look like? There is the main text, of course, the file that the author proudly submits to their publisher. But around this, hemming it in on the page or enclosing it at the front and back of the book, there are dozens of other texts—page numbers and running heads, copyright statements and errata lists—each possessed of particular conventions, each with their own lively histories. To consider these paratexts—recalling them from the
margins, letting them take centre stage—is to be reminded that no book is the sole work of the author whose name appears on the cover; rather, every book is the sum of a series of collaborations. It is to be reminded, also, that not everything is intended for us, the readers. There are sections
that are solely directed at others—binders, librarians, lawyers—parts of the book that, if they are working well, are working discreetly, like a theatrical prompt, whispering out of the audience's ear-shot
Book Parts is a bold and imaginative intervention in the fast growing field of book history: it pulls the book apart. Over twenty-two chapters, Book Parts tells the story of the components of the book: from title pages to endleaves; from dust jackets to indexes—and just about everything in between. Book Parts covers a broad historical range that runs from the pre-print era to the digital, bringing together the expertise of some of the most exciting scholars working
on book history today in order to shine a new light on these elements hiding in plain sight in the books we all read.
margins, letting them take centre stage—is to be reminded that no book is the sole work of the author whose name appears on the cover; rather, every book is the sum of a series of collaborations. It is to be reminded, also, that not everything is intended for us, the readers. There are sections
that are solely directed at others—binders, librarians, lawyers—parts of the book that, if they are working well, are working discreetly, like a theatrical prompt, whispering out of the audience's ear-shot
Book Parts is a bold and imaginative intervention in the fast growing field of book history: it pulls the book apart. Over twenty-two chapters, Book Parts tells the story of the components of the book: from title pages to endleaves; from dust jackets to indexes—and just about everything in between. Book Parts covers a broad historical range that runs from the pre-print era to the digital, bringing together the expertise of some of the most exciting scholars working
on book history today in order to shine a new light on these elements hiding in plain sight in the books we all read.
342 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 27, 2019
22 people are currently reading
350 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Duncan
8 books45 followersDennis Duncan studied English at Manchester University, before completing a PhD at Birkbeck in 2011. After teaching at Birkbeck, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, then Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge. He joined the English department at University College London in 2019.
Library of Congress Authorities: Duncan, Dennis (Dennis J. B.)
Full name: Dennis John Balle Duncan
Library of Congress Authorities: Duncan, Dennis (Dennis J. B.)
Full name: Dennis John Balle Duncan
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 4, 2021
Book Parts thinks of books like the blazon, taking apart and appreciating each small part that makes up the whole, from dust jackets to epigraphs to printer’s ornaments
January 12, 2020
I wish to undersign this review from THE SPECTATOR by Ian Samson dated 11 January 2020:
From frontispiece to endpapers: the last word on the book. A study of book parts, including dust jackets, footnotes, dedications, bibliographies and indexes, turns out to be surprisingly rich, odd and interesting.
Book Parts — hardback, 352 pages, with colour plate section and in-text black and white illustrations, 234x156mm, ISBN 9780198812463, published 2019 by Oxford University Press, ‘a department of the University of Oxford’ which ‘furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing worldwide’, according to the copyright page — has at first glance all the appeal and certainly the appearance of an utterly dull academic tome. The contents page begins forbiddingly by promising a ‘LIST OF FIGURES’ and a ‘LIST OF PLATES’, followed by yet another list, of the academic accomplishments and affiliations of the various ‘CONTRIBUTORS’, plus one of those irritating ‘A NOTE ON THE TYPE’ things (it’s Caslon or Caslon variants, and the fleurons are Caslon Ornaments or Adobe Caslon Pro, as if you care), before finally getting to a list of the contents of the 22 chapters, a ‘SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY’ and, thank goodness, an ‘INDEX’.
Edited by Adam Smyth, fellow at Balliol and professor of English and the History of the Book at the University of Oxford, and Dennis Duncan, a research associate at the Bodleian Library, the book announces itself as an ‘intervention in the growing field of the history of the book’. It consists of chapters by various scholars who examine the book ‘not as a single stable object’ but as a combination of ‘separate component pieces’. Thus, chapters on dust jackets, frontispieces, acknowledgements, dedications and epigraphs etc.
One might well assume, therefore, that Book Parts is going to be pretty much unreadable and uninteresting, except perhaps to that rare sub-sub-species of the academic sub-species, the book historian. The good news is that it’s not at all unreadable or uninteresting. It’s a book designed to appeal to anyone like you or me, the proverbial common reader, who has been reading books for longer than we can remember, yet who perhaps knows next to nothing about the history of the fleuron or the architectural origins of the epigraph and the frontispiece (from medieval Latin, meaning ‘looking at the forehead’ and referring originally to ‘the front of a building’).
I certainly did not know, for example, that the earliest recognised dust jacket belongs to a literary annual entitled Friendship’s Offering of 1829. Nor that e.e. cummings’s self-published No Thanks (1935) contains a dedication to the 14 different publishers who had rejected the manuscript: ‘NO THANKS TO Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, Coward-McCann’, etc. Nor indeed that acknowledgements tend to be printed at the front of academic books, unlike works of fiction where the acknowledgements go at the end — this primary placement offering ‘a means to publish the author’s CV and boast of influential friends’.
There is perhaps sometimes a hint of grad-school swank in the book — as when a title page is described as the site of a book’s self-presentation to its potential audience, where it informs readers about a text by in-forming — moulding into structured information — the facts of its production
and the chapters do vary rather in tone between the hail-fellow-well-met of an introductory guide and the sly Masonic hints and winks of the old-school academic monograph.
But if some chapters read like contributions to a peer-review journal destined to be read by only a very few peers, many others are more welcoming. Tamara Atkin’s fascinating piece on the history of character lists, for example, entices the reader with a description of those at the beginning of Jilly Cooper’s novels. The one for Mount! (2016), doubtless familiar to Spectator readers, includes a note on
Mr WAN (ZIZIN): A corrupt Chinese mafia warlord who is cruelly colonising Africa. Also sexual predator known as ‘The Great Willy of China’.
Book Parts is not a book about the construction and engineering of books but about the forms and conventions in the presentation of words and images on the page, and the relationship between texts and their various paratexts. For the purposes of the paratext that will help determine and accompany the paperback edition, let me offer this little blurbable quote: ‘Rich, odd, interesting.’
From frontispiece to endpapers: the last word on the book. A study of book parts, including dust jackets, footnotes, dedications, bibliographies and indexes, turns out to be surprisingly rich, odd and interesting.
Book Parts — hardback, 352 pages, with colour plate section and in-text black and white illustrations, 234x156mm, ISBN 9780198812463, published 2019 by Oxford University Press, ‘a department of the University of Oxford’ which ‘furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing worldwide’, according to the copyright page — has at first glance all the appeal and certainly the appearance of an utterly dull academic tome. The contents page begins forbiddingly by promising a ‘LIST OF FIGURES’ and a ‘LIST OF PLATES’, followed by yet another list, of the academic accomplishments and affiliations of the various ‘CONTRIBUTORS’, plus one of those irritating ‘A NOTE ON THE TYPE’ things (it’s Caslon or Caslon variants, and the fleurons are Caslon Ornaments or Adobe Caslon Pro, as if you care), before finally getting to a list of the contents of the 22 chapters, a ‘SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY’ and, thank goodness, an ‘INDEX’.
Edited by Adam Smyth, fellow at Balliol and professor of English and the History of the Book at the University of Oxford, and Dennis Duncan, a research associate at the Bodleian Library, the book announces itself as an ‘intervention in the growing field of the history of the book’. It consists of chapters by various scholars who examine the book ‘not as a single stable object’ but as a combination of ‘separate component pieces’. Thus, chapters on dust jackets, frontispieces, acknowledgements, dedications and epigraphs etc.
One might well assume, therefore, that Book Parts is going to be pretty much unreadable and uninteresting, except perhaps to that rare sub-sub-species of the academic sub-species, the book historian. The good news is that it’s not at all unreadable or uninteresting. It’s a book designed to appeal to anyone like you or me, the proverbial common reader, who has been reading books for longer than we can remember, yet who perhaps knows next to nothing about the history of the fleuron or the architectural origins of the epigraph and the frontispiece (from medieval Latin, meaning ‘looking at the forehead’ and referring originally to ‘the front of a building’).
I certainly did not know, for example, that the earliest recognised dust jacket belongs to a literary annual entitled Friendship’s Offering of 1829. Nor that e.e. cummings’s self-published No Thanks (1935) contains a dedication to the 14 different publishers who had rejected the manuscript: ‘NO THANKS TO Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, Coward-McCann’, etc. Nor indeed that acknowledgements tend to be printed at the front of academic books, unlike works of fiction where the acknowledgements go at the end — this primary placement offering ‘a means to publish the author’s CV and boast of influential friends’.
There is perhaps sometimes a hint of grad-school swank in the book — as when a title page is described as the site of a book’s self-presentation to its potential audience, where it informs readers about a text by in-forming — moulding into structured information — the facts of its production
and the chapters do vary rather in tone between the hail-fellow-well-met of an introductory guide and the sly Masonic hints and winks of the old-school academic monograph.
But if some chapters read like contributions to a peer-review journal destined to be read by only a very few peers, many others are more welcoming. Tamara Atkin’s fascinating piece on the history of character lists, for example, entices the reader with a description of those at the beginning of Jilly Cooper’s novels. The one for Mount! (2016), doubtless familiar to Spectator readers, includes a note on
Mr WAN (ZIZIN): A corrupt Chinese mafia warlord who is cruelly colonising Africa. Also sexual predator known as ‘The Great Willy of China’.
Book Parts is not a book about the construction and engineering of books but about the forms and conventions in the presentation of words and images on the page, and the relationship between texts and their various paratexts. For the purposes of the paratext that will help determine and accompany the paperback edition, let me offer this little blurbable quote: ‘Rich, odd, interesting.’
October 2, 2021
4.5 rounded up to 5
This is a very well-edited book that achieves to braid together the voices of more than 20 contributors, who all function like parts of a harmonious whole in terms of writing style, structure, and analytical/critical insight (with very few exceptions falling short of critical depth). It's not very common in academic publishing that we encounter such unison in edited multi-author volumes, but Book Parts manages that cohesion in a way that none of the chapters feel forced, out-of-place or slapdash, which is why I think it deserves 5 stars.
Each writer in the volume employs a clear language, presents a wide array of examples on the topic in a limited space (every chapter is approximately 10 page long), and goes beyond merely compiling and describing facts. I especially enjoyed Helen Smith's chapter on "Acknowledgements and Dedications" where she creatively performs the conventions of the topic she writes on. In fact, the whole book is full of such self-reflexive moments. The editors' introductory chapter, for instance, is both an introduction to the book at hand and a chapter on "Introduction" as a book part. Every chapter features a title page that formally mimics what it talks about, which I thought was ingenious. These meta qualities resonate perfectly with the cover image Books on Books by Jonathan Wolstenholme.
Highly recommended to novices in bibliography like me.
This is a very well-edited book that achieves to braid together the voices of more than 20 contributors, who all function like parts of a harmonious whole in terms of writing style, structure, and analytical/critical insight (with very few exceptions falling short of critical depth). It's not very common in academic publishing that we encounter such unison in edited multi-author volumes, but Book Parts manages that cohesion in a way that none of the chapters feel forced, out-of-place or slapdash, which is why I think it deserves 5 stars.
Each writer in the volume employs a clear language, presents a wide array of examples on the topic in a limited space (every chapter is approximately 10 page long), and goes beyond merely compiling and describing facts. I especially enjoyed Helen Smith's chapter on "Acknowledgements and Dedications" where she creatively performs the conventions of the topic she writes on. In fact, the whole book is full of such self-reflexive moments. The editors' introductory chapter, for instance, is both an introduction to the book at hand and a chapter on "Introduction" as a book part. Every chapter features a title page that formally mimics what it talks about, which I thought was ingenious. These meta qualities resonate perfectly with the cover image Books on Books by Jonathan Wolstenholme.
Highly recommended to novices in bibliography like me.
May 25, 2022
An interesting book that looks at the history and context of the various parts of a modern book and how they came to be. Starting with what covers a book (the dust jacket), the book then looks at what goes in the front of a book (the title, copyright info, publishers info, introduction, table of content, list of characters), what is included with the content (chapter headings, illustrations, footnotes) and what goes in the back (erratas, indexes).
Some parts can be rather dry reading, but some fascinating information on how some parts of a book appeared in the past and then evolved into its current form are fascinating. The book also gives a brief look at how ebooks are affecting the presentation of these parts of the book.
Some parts can be rather dry reading, but some fascinating information on how some parts of a book appeared in the past and then evolved into its current form are fascinating. The book also gives a brief look at how ebooks are affecting the presentation of these parts of the book.
Read
August 16, 2020I've dipped in and out of this one, but the main reason I picked it up was to read the chapter on indexes.
October 28, 2022
Book Parts is a collection of independent essays about (spoiler alert?) parts of books. With each chapter written by a different author, the volume is inevitably somewhat uneven in tone and clarity, but generally editors Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth have done an admirable job unifying the contributions and heading off potential redundancies.
Chapters worthy of particular praise include (in order of appearance) Gill Partington’s essay on Dust Jackets, which should make just about anyone want to visit a library’s rare books room; Shef Rogers’s essay on Imprints, Imprimaturs, and Copyright Pages, which manages to unpack the most tortuous subject in the collection with the clearest writing; Helen Smith’s essay on Acknowledgements and Dedications, which manages to be truly hilarious—repeatedly—without letting the quips interfere with the imparting of information; Tamara Atkin’s essay on Character Lists, which quickly pushed me from a state of active disinterest to total fascination; and Mr Duncan’s own chapter on Indexes (although it may be safely skipped by readers fortunate enough to have read his full book on the subject). Whitney Trettien’s essay on Title Pages deserves an honorable mention; it is hampered by over‐erudite vocabulary but is very much worth bearing with her language.
If there is an overall weakness to this collection, it is that many of the authors are so focused on the function of their book part that they say little or nothing about its form. Claire M. L. Bourne’s essay on Running Titles and Jenny Davidson’s essay on Footnotes are frustratingly silent on matters of placement, size, and formatting; and Hazel Wilkinson’s essay on Printers’ Ornaments and Flowers is hampered by the almost total lack of illustration. These shortcomings are particularly strange in a collection clearly concerned with the book as an object beyond its text and perhaps suggest that these contributions were not written with this collection in mind.
Book Parts itself is nicely designed and is meticulously typeset, albeit with an overzealousness for tight inter‐sentence spaces. The only egregious typesetting failure I noted was a ‘[b]y’ that wrapped lines on p.171.
Chapters worthy of particular praise include (in order of appearance) Gill Partington’s essay on Dust Jackets, which should make just about anyone want to visit a library’s rare books room; Shef Rogers’s essay on Imprints, Imprimaturs, and Copyright Pages, which manages to unpack the most tortuous subject in the collection with the clearest writing; Helen Smith’s essay on Acknowledgements and Dedications, which manages to be truly hilarious—repeatedly—without letting the quips interfere with the imparting of information; Tamara Atkin’s essay on Character Lists, which quickly pushed me from a state of active disinterest to total fascination; and Mr Duncan’s own chapter on Indexes (although it may be safely skipped by readers fortunate enough to have read his full book on the subject). Whitney Trettien’s essay on Title Pages deserves an honorable mention; it is hampered by over‐erudite vocabulary but is very much worth bearing with her language.
If there is an overall weakness to this collection, it is that many of the authors are so focused on the function of their book part that they say little or nothing about its form. Claire M. L. Bourne’s essay on Running Titles and Jenny Davidson’s essay on Footnotes are frustratingly silent on matters of placement, size, and formatting; and Hazel Wilkinson’s essay on Printers’ Ornaments and Flowers is hampered by the almost total lack of illustration. These shortcomings are particularly strange in a collection clearly concerned with the book as an object beyond its text and perhaps suggest that these contributions were not written with this collection in mind.
Book Parts itself is nicely designed and is meticulously typeset, albeit with an overzealousness for tight inter‐sentence spaces. The only egregious typesetting failure I noted was a ‘[b]y’ that wrapped lines on p.171.
October 26, 2025
3.5 stars
As is the case with many edited collections, some chapters are stronger than others. My personal (and unexpected) favourite chapter was the one on Acknowledgements. Some chapters contained this level of flair and humour, while others were unfortunately dry.
This is a useful book to read if you are interested in book history.
As is the case with many edited collections, some chapters are stronger than others. My personal (and unexpected) favourite chapter was the one on Acknowledgements. Some chapters contained this level of flair and humour, while others were unfortunately dry.
This is a useful book to read if you are interested in book history.
July 8, 2024
I'm obsessed with this. It's very technical but gives brief introduction to the various paratexutal elements and other 'book parts' that make up a book beyond the key text (and excluding material aspects like paper and binding). Useful for the diss.
March 14, 2022
I wish there was a less academic/history-heavy and more widely accessible reference-style version of this, but still a great resource with some lovely whimsical details.
April 28, 2025
well written and edited just not for me
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews