I’ve always loved books, but for all the looking through them, I have no distinct memories of noticing the very second thing you see about a book growing up.
The first thing you see is the cover. 
But as soon as you open it, you see the endpaper. You know, that weird page that happens in hardcover books that’s not part of the text block or “book proper…” Often times it’s completely blank. Maybe it’s a solid color.
After all, it’s there to serve a structural function. It’s helping to hold the pages into the cover.
[Alright geeks, how ’bout a little context?: When a book is made (by hand or with giant machines) the pages are sewn together into signatures (so called, because each set of 8 front and back pages in a finished book came off the press as one giant front and back page, the proof or original of which the publisher has to look over and sign off on that it looks right: colors are true, formatting is pleasing, typos aren’t there, etc) before they start printing off a zillion of them. All the (chopped down and assembled) signatures are then sewn together into a text block, and special thicker paper is added to the very front and very back of the block, sort of a pre-cover. This paper is glued to the board inside of the cover to both look nice and neat and hold the block in place inside it’s cover.]
But about 1 in 10 have a surprise! A bonus illustration, pattern, or detail on that very first page that sets the mood and lets you know that whoever made this thing you’re holding really thought about what they were doing, and even thought about you, picking it up someday, hopefully full of anticipation, and they wanted to encourage that.
Call it Courage, 1941. Endpapers illustrated by Armstrong Sperry.
This is something I may have noticed in passing, but never thought about until I started making books by hand. Now I notice them every time I open a book, and it’s such a treat to open a book and see this little extra thought up detail, this thing someone planned, knowing it’ll often get looked over. It’s a wink from the publisher or designer, a secret in plain sight. A flag on the moon, someone saying, “I TAKE PRIDE IN THIS WORK!”
In older books sometimes they’d marble the endpapers. Occasionally they’d print a design in the corner, or maybe even a full page illustration, either the best page or something modified and combined to create something new. Maybe something completely unique to the endpaper. Maps were and continue to be another favorite endpaper image for books in which locations play a large role in the story.
Children’s books are another great place to hunt for fun, colorful, clever, or just plain lovely endpapers. (Mo Willems’ Pigeon books are a great example of clever endpaper usage: often what the Pigeon is doing or saying in the first endpaper is altered on the last endpaper to reflect what has happened in the story between!)
Here are a few endpapers I’ve collected on Instagram from new books we’ve received the last few months. Happy hunting!
