Book Essay #3: Prelims

Book Essay is a series of narrative/descriptive essays on the parts of a book. From the spine to the back cover, each essay will convey my thoughts (largely subjective) on the components of each part of a book—one essay for a book part. These essays will create the awareness that a book is made of many parts, and show how these parts, put together, make the beauty that a book is. I hope that these musings get us into a conversation in the comments. For me, it is a setup that makes me dig deeper to understand the parts of a book. Therefore, these essays will not be preceded by extensive research on the book part. You can be sure to find errors in factual details. But let me be wrong, this one time, since I would do research afterwards. (But flag down my errors, please!) Worry not, the essays are numbered!

Dear Fellow,

I had to defend the title for a book I worked on as the compositor and designer last week. The publisher suggested that we use the book’s subtitle as the book’s title because the subtitle is clearer about the book’s content. I insisted the title stays. These were my reasons: (1) It is the name of the idea upon which the book was written. (2) The title is curious—the publisher agreed to that. (3) There’s a note on the idea behind the title in the book’s Introduction.

A title that I think comes close to the title we debated with the publisher is Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw.¹ Perhaps you are wondering what, which, or whose dog this book is about. Next, you wonder the extent to which the story of what this dog saw is worth telling. I discovered the idea behind the title in the book’s Preface!²

Preface and Introduction are parts of the Preliminary Pages of a book. A book’s interior has three main parts: (1) Front Matter/Preliminary Pages (or Prelims) (2) Text (3) Back Matter/ End Matter/ Reference Matter. This despatch focuses on the Prelims.

According to the fourteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), a standard book’s front matter comprises the following:

Book half-title

Series title, list of contributors, frontispiece, or blank

Title page

Copyright notice, publisher’s agencies, printing history, country where printed, ISBN, CIP

Dedication (or epigraph)

Blank

(Table of) Contents

(List of) Illustrations

(List of) Tables

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgement (if not part of preface)

Introduction (if not part of text)

(List of) Abbreviations or chronology³

You will not see each of these pages in every book, however, the arrangement of the front matter follows this order, especially for publications in the United States where the Chicago Manual is the most widely used manual by publishers. Space would not allow me to go into the details of the components of the Prelims listed above.

This is a page from a Cambridge University Press resource, yet it bears similarity to the resource from The Chicago Manual of Style | Image source: Cambridge University Press

Prelims help us make the most of a book. They contain details on the idea and process of creating the book. Often they are user manuals guiding you to make the most of a book. For example, I found this detail on the prelims (precisely, in the Preface) of my New King James Version of the Bible: “Words or phrases in italics  indicate expressions in the original language which require clarification by additional English words, as also done throughout the history of the King James Bible.” Surely, this detail awakened my eyes to italicised words when reading the Bible.

Not everyone bothers to read Prelims. Some of my friends do not. Most of what I’ve learned about book design and composition was from reading those pages. That section of a book is a treasure field. I hope that readers of the book mentioned at the beginning of this story discover the idea behind the title.

Good Fellow, do you read prelims?

Your LetterMan,

Tongjal, W. N.

1. Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw (Strand, London: Penguin Books, 2009), x-xii.

2. From the Preface: “Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to the writing you now hold in your hands. . . . Then there’s the article after which this book is named. It’s a profile of Cesar Millan, the so-called dog whisperer. Millan can calm the angriest and most troubled of animals with the touch of his hand. What goes on inside Millan’s head as he does that? That was what inspired me to write the piece.”

3. Chicago Editorial Staff, The Chicago Manual of Style: The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).