This chapter contains practical advice on how to write a statement for an inquest.

This chapter treats the design considerations for dictionaries as printed books, the transition from print to digital formats in the thirty years around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the considerations for digital and online formats. Section 1: Customer-focused decisions about format, size, and extent of physical dictionaries; the mapping of book and page components of printed dictionaries; the mutual influence of editorial and design choices; and the advent of digital composition and production for printed formats. Section 2: Factors driving the choice of digital versus print formats for changing customer needs; functional challenges of converting printed dictionaries to digital; design considerations for online interfaces, including both technical performance and user experience.

Reflecting the changes that Chinese writing has undergone during the last century, Chinese signs are neither uniform in character style nor in text orientation. The mixing of different formats is also evident.

In this final chapter, the presentation of the ordo romanus manuscripts is discussed. Their use of innovative script forms and patterns of script use to highlight points of interest to their compilers is analysed. The characteristics of their physical format and layout are used to suggest potential uses and users. Finally, the employment of Latin in the texts is discussed, showing how certain scribes saw no problem recording the ordines in a form of Latin later characterised as ‘debased’. This questions the assumed notion of a wholesale reform of Latin and liturgical Latin in particular. The deployment of Greek in several ordines is also discussed, as a counterpart.

The Minerva Press brand was officially retired in 1820, but its reputation, influence, and significance as an avatar of literary excess persisted long past that end-point. Not only did its erstwhile publisher, A. K. Newman, continue a robust publishing business under his own name in the same premises for more than a decade, but derogatory references to the Press in popular media continued to rise in the decade following its demise. The epilogue begins with an account of the last two Minerva novels, belatedly published in 1821, and traces the press’s influence from them through its reputation in the 1830s and 1840s, concluding with a discussion of the fate of these countless works, long unwanted by copyright libraries, and an account of the publisher Henry Colburn, whose large-scale publishing business attracted many of the same criticisms in the 1820s and 1830s as Lane and Newman’s had done at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The epilogue concludes in the present day, examining recent reappearances of the Minerva Press in historical romance novels and exploring the affinities between popular fiction then and now.

By mid-century, novel readers began to expect a printed framework for reading prose narrative consisting of cues such as page numbers, catchwords, chapter divisions and notes. This chapter tells the backstory of this navigational framework of the eighteenth-century novel that Sterne disrupts, before analysing his experimentation with mise en page. This study of Sterne’s manipulation of seemingly untouchable conventions of the printed page, such as pagination and catchwords, complements an approach to his more widely recognised interference with footnotes and chapters, and reveals the full extent of Sterne’s pioneering disruption of the format of the eighteenth-century book. I argue that Sterne’s innovations with footnotes, catchwords, chapters and pagination combine aspects of Scriblerian satire with more recent but perhaps lesser-known interventions in the codex by Thomas Amory in John Buncle (1756). Unlike Swift and Pope, however, and like Amory, Sterne deploys footnotes in the first edition of Tristram Shandy, encouraging the reader to approach at once all sections of the page in search of meaning and raising questions about literary authority from the outset.

Marie Corelli wrote bestselling supernatural romances and detested the New Woman, while George Paston wrote realistic New Woman novels that cultivated a small, intellectual readership. Yet in the wake of the three-volume novel, both authors produced fiction about the writing life that makes the case for the codex book and the single-volume novel as bulwarks against the circular, self-contained system of other media—a system maintained by men. Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) puts forward the bestselling novel as a means of direct, sanctified connection between celebrity author and adoring audience. Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) looks to the future work, the novel unwritten, as a repository of truth and meaning. Together, they suggest that in the wake of the three-volume novel, the problem of the novel’s relationship to media systems could be approached as a problem of how and whether the novel mediates.

This chapter reexamines the Victorian three-volume novel and its disappearance in the mid-1890s as an event in the media history of fiction. The three-volume format for novels didn’t come to an end because novelists felt aesthetically constrained by it or because readers suddenly rejected it. But its disappearance had important implications for the form and content of fiction, and it provoked widespread discussion of late nineteenth-century fiction’s relationships to its own media and to others. Building on the work of the book historians who have told the economic story of the three-volume format and its fall, this chapter examines the three-volume novel in a different way: as part of a media system that linked private libraries to publishers in an information empire, that tied the distribution of fiction to its material form, and that aligned novels with other print genres such as periodicals that didn’t center on the single codex book.