Drop Folios on Chapter Openers

chapter opener with drop folio

Book Designers of the World: Look at that page pictured above. See that thing at the bottom, the number there: That’s called a drop folio. It’s not usually highlighted and boxed like that, but I wanted to draw your attention to it.

It’s just as easy to add to a template as adding the page number to a running head, and it fills itself in with the page number (just like a running head page number!) in page layout software.

So why not use it? Why are so many books being published with no page number on the chapter opening page?

The table of contents points to each chapter opening page—points to pages that have no page numbers. Who came up with that brilliant design?