Once upon a time, endpapers – those little bits of real estate connecting the inside covers of hardcover books to the pages within – were a site of pure decoration, or maybe, as in the case of The Chronicles of Narnia, a map of a fantasy realm. More recently, illustrators have been reimagining just what endpapers can be – far from decorations or maps, they are now used to bookend and compliment the stories told in books in fascinating ways.
“The illustrator Shaun Tan described them as like quotation marks or parentheses around the story,” said Bruce Handy, a journalist and children’s book author. “In his mind it’s a way of setting the story off. Kind of like an anteroom to the story, or like a transition into the story.”
