Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole.

In the words of Jan Tschichold, book design "though largely forgotten today, methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books these rules have to be brought back to life and applied." Richard Hendel describes book design as "an arcane subject" and refers to the need for a context to understand what that means.

Front matter, or preliminaries ("prelims", for short), is the first section of a book, and is usually the smallest section in terms of the number of pages. The pages are numbered in lower-case Roman numerals. Each page is counted; but no folio or page number is expressed, or printed, on either display pages, or blank pages.^{[citation needed]}

Front matter generally only appears in the first volume in a multi-volume work, although some elements (such as a table of contents or index) may appear in each volume.

Chip Kidd (born September 12, 1964) is an American author, editor, and graphic designer, best known for his book covers.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Kidd grew up in the Reading suburb of Shillington, strongly influenced by American popular culture.

Kidd is currently associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He first joined the Knopf design team in 1986, when he was hired as a junior assistant. Turning out jacket designs at an average of 75 a year, Kidd has freelanced for Doubleday, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Grove Press, HarperCollins, Penguin/Putnam, Scribner and Columbia University Press in addition to his work for Knopf. Kidd also supervises graphic novels at Pantheon, and in 2003 he collaborated with Art Spiegelman on a biography of cartoonist Jack Cole, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. His output includes cover concepts for books by Mark Beyer, Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Frank Miller, Michael Ondaatje, Alex Ross, Charles Schulz, Osamu Tezuka, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, John Updike and others. His design for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel was carried over into marketing for the film adaptation. Oliver Sacks and other authors have contract clauses stating that Kidd design their books.

Jane Holmes Dixon is a retired American Episcopal bishop. She served as Bishop of Washington pro tempore from 2001 to June 2002 in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. Previously, she had served as Bishop Suffragan from 1992 to 2001. She was the second woman consecrated as a bishop in the Episcopal Church.

During her tenure as Bishop pro tempore, Dixon sued in federal court to remove a priest, Samuel Edwards, from a rectorship in Accokeek, Maryland. Dixon had refused to approve Edward's appointment early in 2001, since Edwards opposed the Church's beliefs about female and homosexual ministers. Following several months of acrimony, Dixon and the Episcopal Church filed suit to have Edwards removed. The court ruled in the Church's favor in October. After several appeals, the lawsuit was dropped. Bishop Dixon retired following the election of Bishop John B. Chane.

She is married to David McFarland Dixon and has three children.

<<http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/bishops/0071.html>>