All Fronts Matter, Part I

Book Front Matter Breakdown

Today’s Shelf Life—and Tuesday’s, for that matter—is about important front matter matters. They’re actually not important to anybody but me. Well, sometimes they’re important to other people at the publishing company. They’re rarely important to anybody but us. There are few parts of a published book that even the author doesn’t really give a fig about, but some of these front matter pieces qualify.

Front matter refers to the part of a publication that appears at the front before the actual content—usually, the parts the author wrote—begin. In a book, the front matter is the part that is numbered with Roman numerals (i, ii, iii) before the Arabic numerals begin (1, 2, 3). This is the content that serves administrative and organizational purposes for the book but that, most of the time, nobody is going to actually read. It’s the most skippable part of the book, along with the end matter, which I’ll talk about some other time.

I know I’ve mentioned this anecdote in Shelf Life before but an author sent their final manuscript to a publishing company I worked at one time and they had created their own copyright page. Not just that they had written “© YEAR by Author’s Name” on the page, but they had tried to recreate a copyright page based on what they had seen in other books. They had included a block of self-drafted information made to look like Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data and even the string of numbers at the bottom that indicate the printing. They did not, I presume, know what any of that stuff meant, they just did their level best to provide us (the publisher) with everything they thought we might need. I know it sounds like I’m making fun but when you get something like that you know you’re working with a diligent author who is probably going to follow instructions carefully and meet deadlines and those authors are a gift when you get to work with them.

At the time I was like, “no author has ever had to make a copyright page in the history of authorship and they never will” but with self-publishing getting bigger and better all the time I bet that’s wrong; I bet authors make copyright pages and other front matter all the time. 

I didn’t realize I had so much to say about front matter that I’d have to split this essay into a two-parter but here we are. Today’s Shelf Life will cover the basics of front matter and the title page, and Tuesday’s edition will cover all the other parts of book front matter and some considerations for other types of publication.

There’s a right way to organize a book’s front matter, which means there’s also a wrong way (actually a near-infinite combination of wrong ways). That said, front matter being about the most skippable part of the book for readers, it doesn’t really matter all that much if you don’t go by the book and put your front matter pieces in their Chicago Manual of Style–approved order. No one but the production editors of the world would notice and even we would not care. It doesn’t really matter if your foreword is functionally an introduction or you called your preface an editor’s note. Nobody cares. No figs are given. 

But because information is interesting and people producing their own books may wish to have artfully curated front matter, today’s Shelf Life covers all the possible items that can appear in the front matter of a book, their purpose, what they should (and shouldn’t) contain, and the order in which they should appear.

First, as I said above, the front matter of a book begins numbering with page Roman i, although that page is usually a blind folio meaning the page does not have the number actually printed on it. Most books do not carry a page number on that very first page at the front of the book. But even if the number does not appear anywhere on the page, it’s still page i. Whatever page is the first page that carries a folio, should begin with the number that page is. So if you have your front matter organized like this:

• Page i—half title

• Page ii—blank

• Page iii—full title

• Page iv—copyright

• Page v—table of contents begins

Then the first page that has a folio is probably v, the first page of the table of contents, and that page should carry numeral v, not numeral i. Every page in a book is counted, those that have no page number on them, even blank pages, with one important exception: If there is a photo spread in the center of the book that is usually not counted toward the book’s pages. That’s because photospreads were historically printed separately on different paper and then placed between two folios at the center of the book before binding. That’s not done so much anymore but just for your information. A photo spread of this nature will always have a number of pages divisible by eight, because it is printed as its own full or part signature. 

So you begin with the very first page of your book, which is Roman i, and you continue with the Roman numbering till you get to the first page of your book that is not front matter, which could be an introduction, a part page (“Part I”), or a chapter opener (“Chapter 1”). An introduction can be paginated with the front matter or with the main text, that’s usually up to the author’s (or production’s) discretion.

The other thing to know about front matter is that it is often pepper with blank verso (left-side) pages because there are a lot of parts of the front matter that traditionally always appear on a recto (right-side) page. For instance, your title page may not be the first page in the book (you could have a half title, series page, and/or frontispiece before the title page) and, if it is not the first but the second element of your front matter, you want to make sure to put a blank verso page in there so the full title page falls on a recto page. 

If you’re publishing digital only, verso and recto pages matter less or not at all. This is mainly germane to the print edition, if you have one.

Finally, there are several elements of the front matter that can be placed in other parts of the book. Like the introduction, I already mentioned, can be in the front matter or in the main text. Likewise, there are some elements that can appear in the front matter or in the end matter. Further, plenty of possible front matter elements are optional. No book needs to include all of these. The only elements of front matter that are necessary to have are the title page, copyright page, and table of contents. (I’m honestly dubious about tables of contents, I don’t feel like novels really need those in every case.) All the other elements are optional.

Title Pages

As I already mentioned, book front matter can contain up to three title pages—I mean, any number of title pages really; you can keep putting more and more. You can do what you want, it’s your book. But three is the traditional maximum. The first is called the half title page, and contains only the book’s title. Not the subtitle, not the author’s name, not the publisher’s name and logo, just the title of the book. This is page i if you’re including a half title. Half title pages are optional.

After the half title page, on the reverse side, you can include a series page if your book is part of a series. This is the page that you sometimes see in books that list other titles by this author. You can put that later in the front matter or you can include it on the verso of the half title. If your book is part of an edited series, the series page would go here. This is mostly a phenomenon of scholarly nonfiction.

Another option for the verso of the half title page is a frontispiece. This is an illustration that goes in the front matter of the book. In fantasy fiction, maps are popular frontispieces. If you have a frontispiece illustration for your book, the traditional place for it is between the half title and full title pages.

If you don’t have anything to put between the half title and full title pages, and if your book will be in print (not digital-only), then page ii should be blank so that the full title falls on a recto page. 

Next, on page iii, is your full title page. If you are not going to begin with a half title page on i, start with your full title page on i. The first page of your book should be a title page on way or another.

The full title page should include the title, subtitle, author’s name (and translator’s name, if there is one), publisher’s name, logo, and location. If the book is a subsequent new edition (that is, not the first edition but second or later), the edition number should be included as well. Edition number should be spelled out (“Second Edition,” not “2nd Ed”).

The byline should not say “by”; just go right into the author’s name. If the work was coauthored, follow this format:

• One author: John Doe

• Two authors: John Doe and Jane Q Public

• Three or more authors: John Doe, Jane Q Public, and Hambone Fake-Namington (“and” before final name)

If the book is an edited collection rather than a single-authored work—for instance, a collection of short stories from many different authors that has been organized and edited by one or more editors—the editor’s name(s) should appear on the title page and the individual authors’ names should not (those will be on the table of contents). In this case the byline would read:

• One editor: Edited by John Doe

• Two editors: Edited by John Doe and Jane Q Public

• Three or more editors: Edited by John Doe, Jane Q Public, and Hambone Fake-Namington (“and” before final name)

Academic and professional degrees (PhD, MBA, JD, et cetera), even if relevant to the content of the book, are usually omitted from the front cover and title pages (except MD if the book is on a medical topic, according to Chicago style). This information (author credential) is usually included on the about the author page (in the back matter). 

The exception to a blank ii and placing your title page on iii is if you want your full title page to cover two facing pages as a spread, for instance page ii and page iii, or page iv and page v. A spread always has to start with a verso and finish with a recto so you can see both pages at once when the book is open; a spread can’t start on a recto and end on the verso. If you want to do a two-page spread for your full title page, start with a half title on i and then do your spread on ii and iii. By the way, books should almost never contain blank recto pages. Blanks are for verso pages only. If you need to skip over a recto page to get to the next verso, find something to put on it.

I know I said up to three title pages and I only mentioned two, but the third (optional) title page comes later in the front matter so I’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Coming up next Tuesday, all the other part of the front matter—and there are many. Stay tuned!

---

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.