ABSTRACT

This chapter is about page layout – the arrangement of dierent text elements (for example, chunks of prose, illustrations, and headlines) within a physical frame such as a book page or a screen. It is an aspect of text that has not been as widely studied as some others and that is easy to overlook. It is largely (but not entirely) absent from literature, and it is therefore correspondingly absent from literary studies of text, and absent from theories of text that originate in literary studies. Instead, it is associated with non-literary genres such as children’s books, user manuals, catalogues, and newspapers, which have been less intensely studied. Because layout is a nonlinear, holistic quality of text, it is hard to dene and to quantify. And it tends to get forgotten when new technologies for creating, storing, and retrieving text are developed.