References in the Text
A variation of this has to do with notes and cross-references. How many times have you ended up frustrated with end-notes (notes grouped in the back of the book, as opposed to footnotes on the same page), because it was hard to flip back and forth between the notes and the text without losing your place? The information in the notes section that identifies what chapter the notes belong with should be the same information you see on the page when you're reading the chapter. It doesn't do much good to see a section of notes in the back of the book labeled "Chapter Three" if the running heads in Chapter Three never mention the chapter number, identifying it only by chapter title.

If the book you're designing has cross-references, they should be obvious. In reference books, a traditional way of indicating names and terms that have their own entries is to put them in small caps, but this only works if the text face has a set of true small caps and if the typesetter takes the trouble to letterspace them slightly looser than the surrounding text. Using the "small caps" command in a word-processing program to create fake small caps, by just shrinking the full caps, is a ghastly practice that produces unreadable little blobs of tangled, too-light type.

On the other hand if you use italics to indicate either cross-references or something like words that have an entry in a glossary, make sure the italic of the typeface you're using is easily readable. In general, Renaissance-style italics, such as Bembo italic or Minion italic, are easier to read than the rounded 19th-century Modern-style italics like Didot italic or Scotch italic, though this is a rule of thumb with plenty of exceptions.

Front & Back, Inside & Out
In general, the front and back matter of a book (things like the table of contents, the preface, the index, and any appendices) should be in the style of the body of the book, but perhaps set in a smaller type size. The heart of any book is the main text, and everything else should grow out of it.

This applies even to the cover or dust jacket, although modern commercial publishing practice makes this extremely hard. The cover should be an outgrowth of the interior, ideally; at the very least, it should harmonize with the design of the book itself. But in most large publishing companies, not only are the cover or jacket and the interior designed by two different people, but those people may not even be part of the same department or division.

Book covers and jackets are considered part of the marketing of the book, which is logical enough. But in a day when most books are paperbacks, where the cover is inextricably part of the book itself (unlike a removable jacket), this promotional material is going to be part of the book on the bookshelf, not just in the store. It had better be something attractive, something a reader can bear to have on the shelf.

Incidentally, in a hardcover book with a jacket, the actual cover of the cloth binding should reflect the interior design, not the jacket design. It's rarely effective to use the same type treatment embossed into the cloth that you've used printed on the flimsy jacket. Similarly, there's no reason on earth for the book's title page to look like the cover.

Editors & Designers
The last detail to cover is a philosophical one: which decisions are typographic and which are editorial. As someone who works as both an editor and a graphic designer, I find no conflict between these two ways of looking at text, but most people specialize in one or the other. Editors need to know what typographic tools they have at their disposal in order to make sense of complex information in a book, but they shouldn't be deciding how the designer will distinguish one kind of information from another. It's all too common, for instance, for an editor to insist that certain elements of the text be in small caps, when the designer may find that the typeface doesn't have true small caps or that there's another, better way to handle the distinction needed.

Editors and designers need to talk to each other, all the way through the process of developing a book.

Resources
For all my present wordiness, this is just a quick once-over of some of the more obvious parts of designing a book. The best source is simply the books you see every day: The best are the good examples, and the worst should be taken as warnings of what not to do.

Of course, there are also some very useful books on book design. Some of them were written before the desktop-publishing revolution, so they don't reflect current production techniques, but the best will give you a solid grounding in the principles involved -- principles that don't change just because the type is now set digitally. Here are a few of the best books on the subject:

Jost Hochuli & Robin Kinross, "Designing Books: Practice and Theory." (London: Hyphen Press, 1997; U.S. distributor, Chronicle Books.)

Jan Tschichold, "The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design." (Vancouver, B.C., & Point Roberts, Wash.: Hartley & Marks, 1991.)

Adrian Wilson, "The Design of Books." (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1967. Reprinted with new introduction: San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993.)

Hugh Williamson, "Methods of Book Design: The Practice of an Industrial Craft." (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1983. Third edition.)

Read more by John D. Berry.