![Blank page intentionally end of book](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Blank_page_intentionally_end_of_book.jpg)
An intentionally blank page or vacat page (from Latin: ''vacare'' for "being empty") is a
page
Page most commonly refers to:
* Page (paper), one side of a leaf of paper, as in a book
Page, PAGE, pages, or paging may also refer to:
Roles
* Page (assistance occupation), a professional occupation
* Page (servant), traditionally a young mal ...
that has no content and may be unexpected. Such pages may serve purposes ranging from place-holding to space-filling and content separation. Sometimes, these pages carry a notice such as "This page intentionally left blank." Such notices typically appear in printed works, such as legal documents, manuals, and exam papers, in which the reader might otherwise suspect that the blank pages are due to a
printing
Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ea ...
error and where missing pages might have serious consequences.
Uses for intentionally blank pages
![AEC blank page](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/AEC_blank_page.png)
Intentionally blank pages are usually the result of printing conventions and techniques. Chapters conventionally start on an odd-numbered page (
recto page); therefore, if the preceding chapter happens to have an odd number of pages, a blank page is inserted at the end. Book pages are often printed on large sheets because of technical and financial considerations. Thus, a group of 8, 16, or 32 consecutive pages will be printed on a single sheet in such a way that when the sheet is mechanically folded and cut, the pages will be in the correct order for binding. This is called an
even working
Even working is a term used in book publishing that means the number of pages in a book is divisible by the number 16 or 32.R. M. Ritter, ''The Oxford Guide to Style'', OUP, 2002, p. 1. A book with 256, 272 or 288 pages, for instance, is an "even ...
, and the group of pages is called a section or signature. Books printed in this manner will always have a number of pages that is a multiple of the number in such a signature, such as a multiple of 8, 16, or 32. As a result, these books will usually have pages left blank, unless by chance or editorial ingenuity the exact number of pages is printed.
For example, if a book with 318 pages of content is printed using 32-page signatures, it will require 10 signatures, 320 pages in total. At the very end of the bookthat is, at the end of the last signaturethere will be two unused (blank) pages.
If a printer's document processor has been designed to skip completely blank pages, notices may also be required on intentionally blank pages to prevent incorrect
page numbering
Page numbering is the process of applying a sequence of numbers (or letters, or Roman numerals) to the pages of a book or other document. The number itself, which may appear in various places on the page, can be referred to as a page number or as ...
.
Intentionally blank pages are ubiquitous in technical and instructional manuals, directories, and other large, mass-produced volumes of text. The contents of manuals produced by a given product's vendor are often compiled from generic instructions suitable for a variety of products, with additional instructions or chapters included for the specific product or model in question. This automation of manual generation leads to intentionally blank pages to fit the requirements for mass printing.
In digital documents, pages are intentionally left blank so that the document can be printed correctly in double-sided format, rather than have new chapters start on the backs of pages. Intentionally blank pages have also been used in documents distributed in
ring binder
Ring binders (loose leaf binders, looseleaf binders, or sometimes called files in Britain) are large folders that contain file folders or hole punched papers. These binders come in various sizes and can accommodate an array of paper sizes. The ...
s. The intention is to leave room for expansion without breaking the document's page numbering. This allows updates to be made to a document while requiring minimal new pages, reducing printing costs. The only drawback is the increased time required by the reader to manually insert various newly updated pages into their correct locations in the document.
Standardized tests
![No test material on this page](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/No_test_material_on_this_page.svg)
Intentionally blank pages can be useful in
standardized test
A standardized test is a test that is administered and scored in a consistent, or "standard", manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions and interpretations are consistent and are administered and scored in a predete ...
s such as the
GCSE
The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is an academic qualification in a particular subject, taken in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. State schools in Scotland use the Scottish Qualifications Certificate instead. Private sc ...
,
Higher School Certificate,
SAT
The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and scoring have changed several times; originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, it was later called the Schol ...
,
CAT
The cat (''Felis catus'') is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and is commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat to distinguish it from the wild members of ...
,
ACT,
MCAT
The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT; ) is a computer-based standardized examination for prospective medical students (both Allopathic M.D. and Ostepathic D.O.) in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Caribbean Islands. It is designed ...
, and
GRE
The Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) is a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for many graduate schools in the United States and Canada and a few other countries. The GRE is owned and administered by Educational Testing Servi ...
. In these exams, there are often individual, timed sections in which test-takers are prohibited from proceeding to the next section until that section's time interval has passed and the examiner allows them to continue. Because all of these separate sections are printed consecutively in the examination booklet, it may be possible for a test-taker who has finished the section early to see through the page and read the problems in the next section. By placing intentionally blank pages between these sections, the test-taker is prevented from cheating in this way. By printing a notice on the page, such as ''"this page has been intentionally left blank",'' test-takers will not be concerned that their test has been misprinted, especially as test instructions often instruct students to check for missing or blank pages and to report any defective test booklets to a proctor. These pages may also be useful as
scratch paper
Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, Textile, rags, poaceae, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre e ...
.
Sheet music
In books of
sheet music
Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses List of musical symbols, musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chord (music), chords of a song or instrumental Musical composition, musical piece. Like ...
, relatively short pieces of music that span two to four pages often need to be arranged so the number of page turns for the performer is minimized. For example, a three-page work (starting on the left-hand sheet) followed immediately by a two-page work involves one page turn during each work. If a blank page immediately followed the three-page work (on the right-hand sheet), the two-page work will span the left and right pages, alleviating the need for a page turn during the second work. Intentionally blank pages may also prevent a page turn during a difficult passage.
Classified documents
In the United States armed forces,
classified documents require page checks whenever custody is transferred or an inventory is conducted. Blank pages are all marked "This page intentionally left blank", so page checks are unambiguous, and every page of the document is accounted for.
Variations
Intentionally blank pages placed at the end of books are often used to balance the
folio
The term "folio" (), has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book ma ...
s that make up the book (see
bookbinding
Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book of codex format from an ordered stack of ''signatures'', sheets of paper folded together into sections that are bound, along one edge, with a thick needle and strong thread. Cheaper, b ...
). Often these pages are completely blank with no such statement or are used as "Notes" pages, serving a practical purpose. In the case of
telephone-number directories, these pages are often used to list important numbers and addresses. These pages may list other books available from the same publisher.
Book publishers have also used stylized designs (
dingbat
In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, (similar to box-drawing characters) or a ...
s) underneath the last paragraph of a chapter to indicate that no other content is to be expected until the next chapter, allowing for the possibility of blank pages without misunderstandings by the readers.
There are also published books that, as a novelty,
contain nothing but blank pages.
Examples
*Humorist
Don Novello
Donald Andrew Novello (born January 1, 1943) is an American actor, comedian, singer, writer, film director and producer. He is best known for his work on NBC's ''Saturday Night Live'' from 1978 to 1980, and again from 1985 to 1986, often as the ...
's 1977 book ''The Lazlo Letters'' ends with several otherwise-blank pages marked "FREE PAPER!".
*
Andy Griffiths' 1999 children's book ''
Just Stupid!
Just! is a series of short story collections by Australian children's author Andy Griffiths, illustrated by Terry Denton. The book series is based on Andy Griffiths's early life. The series has been described as a portrayal of the antics of a pr ...
'' begins with a cartoon snail saying to the reader, "This page would be blank if I were not here telling you that this page would be blank if I were not here telling you that..."
*Comedian
Demetri Martin
Demetri Evan Martin ( el, Δημήτριος Ευάγγελος Μάρτιν, ''Dimitrios Evangelos Martin''; born May 25, 1973) is an American comedian, actor, writer, director, cartoonist and musician. He was a contributor on ''The Daily Show'' ...
's 2012 book ''This Is A Book'' contains an otherwise blank page which says, "This page unintentionally left blank."
*
Iranian novelist Reza Amirkhani
Reza Amirkhani ( fa, رضا امیرخانی; born 16 May 1973) is a contemporary Iranian novelist.
He started writing in high school with the ''Ermia'' novel.
He has studied mechanical engineering at Sharif University of Technology and is a ...
's book ''Man-e-oo'' (His Ego) has one whole chapter of blank pages.
*The phrase was a recurring joke in
Infocom
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''.
...
text adventure games. In their first title, ''
Zork 1
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded an ...
'', inspecting an engraved wooden door resulted in the text: "The engravings translate to 'This space intentionally left blank'."
*
Idries Shah
Idries Shah (; hi, इदरीस शाह, ps, ادريس شاه, ur, ; 16 June 1924 – 23 November 1996), also known as Idris Shah, né Sayed Idries el- Hashimi (Arabic: سيد إدريس هاشمي) and by the pen name Arko ...
's book ''
The Book of the Book'' contains 10 pages describing why the following pages are important, and then a large number of blank pages. Its main purpose is to demonstrate the theory that
you shouldn't judge the content by its container.
*A chapter of ''
The Tale of Genji'' titled ''Kumogakure'' ("Vanished into the Clouds") is left blank but implies the death of Genji.
See also
*
Bookbinding
Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book of codex format from an ordered stack of ''signatures'', sheets of paper folded together into sections that are bound, along one edge, with a thick needle and strong thread. Cheaper, b ...
*
Blind folio
Page numbering is the process of applying a sequence of numbers (or letters, or Roman numerals) to the pages of a book or other document. The number itself, which may appear in various places on the page, can be referred to as a page number or as ...
*
Cancels
*
Endpaper
The endpapers or end-papers of a book (also known as the endsheets) are the pages that consist of a double-size sheet folded, with one half pasted against an inside cover (the pastedown), and the other serving as the first free page (the free end ...
*
Leiden Conventions
The Leiden Conventions or Leiden system is an established set of rules, symbols, and brackets used to indicate the condition of an epigraphic or papyrological text in a modern edition. In previous centuries of classical scholarship, scholars who ...
*
Octavo
Octavo, a Latin word meaning "in eighth" or "for the eighth time", (abbreviated 8vo, 8º, or In-8) is a technical term describing the format of a book, which refers to the size of leaves produced from folding a full sheet of paper on which multip ...
*
Publishing
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
*
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...
*
Special:BlankPage
References
External links
Everything2 discussion of the phrasephrase translated into over 60 languages (via
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
).
Guide to writing intentionally blank pagesin
XSL-FO
XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) is a markup language for XML document formatting that is most often used to generate PDF files. XSL-FO is part of XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), a set of W3C technologies designed for the transformation and ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Intentionally Blank Page
Documents
Book design