Endpapers, headbands and the parts of a hardcover
A hardcover is assembled from parts, and the parts have names. Most authors meet those names for the first time in a quote from a bindery, with a price beside each one.
Learning them pays twice. It tells you what a browsing reader is unconsciously comparing your book against, and which upgrades are worth money if you ever print a run. Paperback, hardcover, dust jacket: what changes covers how the three bindings differ as files. This is the vocabulary of the object itself.
The case
The case is the hard cover: two boards, a narrower spine strip between them, and a covering material glued across all three and turned in around the edges. The boards are dense pressed board, cut slightly larger than the pages so that a lip of cover stands proud on three sides. That lip is called the square, and it is there to take the knocks instead of the paper.
The covering is where print-on-demand and a trade bindery part company. At print-on-demand it is a case laminate — your artwork printed onto the wrap and sealed — or a plain cloth-look material under a dust jacket. At a bindery it can be book cloth, paper over board or a synthetic leather, with the title stamped in foil rather than printed.
The endpapers
An endpaper is one sheet folded once, so it is a spread. Half of it is pasted flat to the inside of the board — the pastedown — and the other half is the first loose leaf you turn, the free endpaper. There is one at the front and one at the back.
They are not decoration with a structural excuse. The pastedown is a large part of what holds the text block into the case, and it covers the ragged turn-in of the covering material at the same time. Endpaper stock is heavier than text paper because it carries that load and is glued wet.
The hinge
The hinge is where the case bends when the book opens: a narrow channel between the board and the spine strip, inside and out. Some bindings press a deeper groove there, which makes the book open flatter and gives the spine a defined edge.
Two things follow. The hinge is where a hardcover fails first, so it is the part to flex when you check a proof. And it is a crushed, glued, folded strip of paper, so nothing you care about in an endpaper design should land in it.
Headband and tailband
These are the small woven strips glued across the top and bottom of the spine, visible as a stripe of color when you look down at a shelved book. Head is the top, tail is the bottom. On a hand-sewn book they anchored the ends of the sections; on a modern trade book they are cosmetic, and a two-color stripe is the conventional look.
They cost very little on a run and are almost never offered at print-on-demand.
Rounded or square back
The spine of a bound block can be left flat, giving a square back, or rounded into a shallow convex curve and backed so its edges flare slightly to seat the boards. Rounding is traditional on thicker books and resists the wedge shape a flat spine drifts into over time. Square is standard at print-on-demand.
Gilt and sprayed edges
The three cut edges of the block — head, fore edge and tail — can be finished after binding: gilded with metal leaf, sprayed a flat color, or printed with a design that only resolves when the pages are fanned. This is the feature that carries special editions on social media, and it is an operation performed on a stack of already-bound books, which is exactly why no upload form offers it.
In the Cover Maker. Set the binding and the printer and the wrap is rebuilt to that company's own geometry, with live trim, bleed and safe-area guides — case laminate and dust jacket wraps differ from each other, and from one printer to the next, by more than authors expect. Start your cover → · about the Cover Maker
What you can specify at print-on-demand
Being blunt about it: almost none of the above.
- Endpapers are plain, from a short fixed list, if there is a choice at all.
- Headbands are absent or fixed, and not yours to pick.
- The back is square.
- The case is a printed laminate or a cloth-look wrap in a set range of colors, with foil stamping rarely on the menu.
- Edges are cut and left.
What you do control is the printed case artwork, or the jacket over it, and that is where your design effort belongs. Check what your printer actually builds before you describe the book anywhere: a listing promising sprayed edges and a book without them is a refund conversation.
At a specialty printer
A trade bindery will quote every one of these, each as its own line with its own minimum quantity, because each is a separate pass through a separate machine. Ask for them itemized rather than bundled, so you can drop the ones that do not earn their place. Costs vary by country and by shop, so get them quoted rather than estimated. Working with a local printer instead of print-on-demand covers the rest of that conversation.
Printed endpapers are the one worth pushing for
If you upgrade one thing on a fiction title, make it the endpapers. A map, a repeated motif, a pattern pulled from the cover — the reader meets it before the first sentence, in the two seconds between opening the board and finding the title page. Nothing else on this list buys that much attention for so little.
Design it as what it is: a spread with a fold through the middle, half of it pasted down and partly obscured by the board, the hinge crushing a strip near the gutter, the outer edges trimmed and turned in. Keep everything you care about away from the center and away from the edges, and prefer a pattern that survives losing its margins to a picture that does not. A map that must be read is usually better placed on an interior page — see Maps and diagrams inside a book — or drawn so the free half stands alone.
One more thing to raise with the bindery: heavy solid ink on a heavy sheet can cockle when it is pasted down wet. They will know their stock. Ask.
Make your cover
The Cover Maker is free to use: name your book, bring your artwork, and it draws the full wrap — front, spine and back — to your printer's own measurements. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Proofing a hardcover · More: Dust jackets, and the extra geometry they need · Slipcases and boxed sets · Merchandise and special editions