blank.
The back cover is the usual place for the
book's ISBN and maybe a photograph of the
author(s)/ editor(s), perhaps with a short
introduction to them. Also here often appear
plot summaries, barcodes and excerpted
reviews of the book.[43]
The body of the books is usually divided into
parts, chapters, sections and sometimes
subsections that are composed of at least a
paragraph or more.
Illustration
The illustration of handwritten manuscript
books was well established in ancient times, and
the tradition of the illuminated manuscript
Scheme of common book design
thrived in the West until the invention of
printing.[44][45] Other parts of the world had 1. Belly band
comparable traditions, such as the Persian 2. Flap
miniature.[46] Woodblock printing emerged in 3. Endpaper
China, spread to Japan by the 9th century,[47] 4. Cover
and spread across Europe in the 13th 5. Head
century.[48] Modern book illustration comes 6. Fore edge
from the 15th-century woodcut illustrations that 7. Tail
were fairly rapidly included in early printed 8. Right page (recto if printing is left to right,
books, and later block books.[47] Other verso if right to left)
techniques such as engraving, etching, and 9. Left page (verso if printing is left to right, recto
lithography expanded the possibilities and were if right to left)
notably used by the French artists Daumier, 10. Gutter
Doré, and Gavarni.[47]
Manufacturing
The methods used for the printing and binding of books continued fundamentally unchanged from
the 15th century into the early 20th century. While there was more mechanization, a book printer in
1900 still used movable metal type assembled into words, lines, and pages to create copies. Modern
paper books are printed on paper designed specifically for printing. Traditionally, book papers are off-
white or low-white papers (easier to read), are opaque to minimize the show-through of text from one
side of the page to the other and are (usually) made to tighter caliper or thickness specifications,
particularly for case-bound books. Different paper qualities are used depending on the type of book:
Machine finished coated papers, woodfree uncoated papers, coated fine papers and special fine papers
are common paper grades.
