From frontispiece to endpapers: the last word on the book

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’).