Postface

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A postface is the opposite of a preface, a brief article or explanatory information placed at the end of a book. Sometimes general information about a book and the people for whom it was written is at the back of the book in a postface. In ancient Chinese works, the postface is called 序/叙言. Afterwords are quite often used in books so that the non-pertinent information will appear at the end of the literary work, and not confuse the reader.

Some may regard this entry as a joke based on Carol Fisher Saller's comment in her book The Subversive Copy Editor that you can't put the preface at the end of the book. After all, it's not called a "postface."

However, there are at least two authentic examples of postfaces in published works. One can be found in the 1954 book Dali's Mustache: A Photographic Interview, by Salvador Dalí and Philippe Halsman. While the main body of the work is a collaboration, each author gets a few words to himself, Dali in the preface and Halsman in the postface. Another occurs in the philosopher Hegel's work The Origin of the Work of Art and is further cited in Jacques Derrida's reading of it in The Truth in Painting (1987).

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