Gallery of illustrated book endpapers

Endpapers are the inside covers and facing pages of books. Today, endpapers are almost always blank. But our more sophisticated forebears made good use of endpapers by adding thematic illustrations to them. Amy Crehore alerted me to this nice gallery of endpapers. (Shown here: The Junior Instructor, Book 1 reprinted in 1962 but originally from 1923.) Link

• [Roger Knights]

  Our more sophisticated forebears knew a few other tricks that could/should be revived:

  1. Chapter-contents previews. These were like tables of contents at the top of each chapter, except that they lacked a page number associated with each topic. (Word processing software would make this easy to provide today.) They weren’t just in non-fiction, but even in fiction. They provided the reader with a helpful “handrail,” something that’s sometimes nice to have.

  2. Artwork in works of fiction. The probable reason for their disappearance (besides cost) was a snooty desire to avoid a comic-book or children’s-book look. Oh yes, and to let the alleged masterpiece speak for itself.

  3. Maps and diagrams in works of fiction. The omission of such vital aids from “thrillers” and detective stories is semi-criminal–and most other novels would benefit from them as well. Layouts of houses and their environs are often hard to visualize from a sketchy written description. Or even from a verbose one.

  4. Flowery dingbats or icons separating subdivisions of a chapter, in works of fiction, signaling a change of topic or locale, etc. Why not provide such useful landmarks? (They were probably dropped as part of a Modernist impulse to get rid of every sort of Victorian “gingerbread.”)

• [Anonymous]

  I can’t believe nobody has mentioned it but that particular endpaper you’ve chosen was used as the back cover for Tripping Daisy’s 1998 album “Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb” and came as a postcard in the DVD release of The Polyphonic Spree’s “Soldier Girl” single, both Tim DeLaughter bands.