This monograph closes with a reading of Sterne’s extra-textual collaboration with Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth, on frontispieces for his Sermons of Mr. Yorick as well as for Tristram Shandy. These images were both free-standing as well as bookish ones bound within Sterne’s works, and served as important marketable visuals to prospective buyers. This final discussion of design elements beyond the narrative proper of Tristram Shandy demonstrates how, for Sterne, his literary project spanned print media, constructing an image of the man and the book as a print commodity.

This chapter reveals Sterne theorising his own experimentation with the visual appearance of the novel through images of the hand and handwriting. It measures the extent of Sterne’s innovation with the typographic manicule and his representation of script in print, comparing his innovations with those of Samuel Richardson a decade earlier while identifying the first known instance of printed strikethrough. Sterne inscribed his work with innovative examples of real and fictional handwriting, signing each copy of his novel and commissioning an original woodcut device to create the strikethrough. The chapter explores Sterne’s use of existing print practices or processes of book production in unusual and surprising ways. It establishes Sterne’s position in the print shop and his desire for his works to have specific material attributes, identifying also his anxiety over the potential invasion of his copyright. In revealing the author’s attempts to control every aspect of book production and his engagement with copyright debates, this chapter positions Sterne as a book designer well versed in codices from multiple disciplines and their varied modes of presenting printed data.

When Sterne (unsuccessfully) pitched to Robert Dodsley the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, he was directing his novel to the very man whose career had been built on writing and publishing texts which sat on generic boundaries, such as his play The Toy-Shop (1735). Through an analysis of experimental texts in this tradition, including novels such as Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding’s The Cry: A Dramatic Fable (1754) and Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which imported dramatic devices into mid-century prose, this chapter contextualises Sterne’s mise en page experimentation within a wider mid-century fascination with hybrid print forms. Sterne was arguably aware of the theatrical heritage of sermon punctuation when he displaced these typographic characteristics from his professional work into his fiction, where such visual markers appeared innovative and surprising. By analysing Sterne’s sermonic punctuation and linking it to his development of a mid-century aesthetics of typesetting the novel, I suggest that Sterne drew from Anglican works published from within his professional context while responding to a 1750s fashion for printing closet drama and dramatic novels.

The introduction to the book historicises early responses to Sterne’s pioneering visual devices and establishes the rarity of illustrated first edition novels at mid-eighteenth century. It provides an insight into Sterne’s remarkable contribution to the history of the novel while justifying the scope of this project, which is to tackle mid-century book design more broadly. If first edition novels did not traditionally include visuals, what kind of books did? It also provides a brief outline of the contents.

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.

The second chapter deals with the black page commemorating the death of parson Yorick, often perceived as the pre-eminent symbol of Stern’s experimentation. This chapter suggests that with the black page, Sterne references a longstanding tradition of woodcut ornaments and mourning typography in funeral publications from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, but which had reached their peak in the 1612 commemorations of the death of Henry, Prince of Wales. But he comments on how far this form of typographic commemoration has become clichéd by drawing from two recent typesetting trends: the representation of major funeral processions in newspapers and gravestone-like pages in the mid-century novel, as evidenced in Tom Jones (1749), Peregrine Pickle (1751) and William Toldervy’s Two Orphans (1756). Through considering the rarely studied mourning borders around Yorick’s epitaph alongside the black page’s double-sided covering of black ink, this chapter sees Sterne engaging with past and contemporary clichés of mourning iconography while playing upon – and pushing to its limits – the novelistic epitaph’s self-conscious manipulation of the printed page.

The final chapter considers Sterne’s use of engraved lines as illustrations of digression. Contextualising the print history of lines, the chapter examines the history of the dance manual, which, like that of Tristram Shandy, is one of innovation. Dance manuals were visual texts that had to be ever more experimental in their attempt to instruct by means of the printed page. Tristram Shandy shares with Beauchamp-Feuillet manuals diagrams which become demystified through labelling: the four plotlines closing volume 6 and Trim’s flourish in volume 9. Sterne defers annotating these lines to encourage the reader to encounter the digressive text in a looping and non-linear manner. Trim’s flourish is remarkably like the symbols which in the Beauchamp-Feuillet dance notation system represent arm movements or dance steps, and the serpentine, Hogarthian progress of a dance like the minuet, one of the most popular dances of the mid-eighteenth century. Like Sterne’s use of dance in Tristram Shandy, Trim’s flourish, when read alongside eighteenth-century dance notation, signifies both the one-off movement of his stick and the inability of anyone in Sterne’s novel to progress in a straight line.

The third volume of Tristram Shandy opens with Tristram’s eventual arrival into the Shandy family, when his nose is crushed during a bungled forceps delivery, causing Walter to throw himself prostrate on the bed. Sterne inserts his most startling innovation, the marbled page, within a volume almost entirely concerned with the publication and collection of medical books. This chapter situates Sterne’s remarkable visual device within a history of colour book illustration dominated by scientific works of the kind treasured by Walter Shandy. It also recounts the history of marbled paper, commonly recognised as book binding material but lesser known as medical packaging for nostrums prescribed to treat wounds and ailments. As a colour illustration in the instalment of Tristram Shandy addressing a wounded nose, for eighteenth-century readers the colour and dimensions of the marbled leaf would have simultaneously recalled colour-illustrated medical books and distinctively packaged branded remedies. The marbled page, therefore, references a full range of paper materials seeking to theorise, diagnose and treat malfunctioning bodies.