Chapter (books)

A chapter is one of the main divisions of a piece of writing of relative length, such as a book. Chapters can be numbered in the case of such writings as law code (see Chapter 7 or Chapter 11) or they can be titled. For example, the first chapters of some well-known novels are titled:

• "The Boy Who Lived" – Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J. K. Rowling
• "Down the Rabbit-Hole" – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
• "Into the Primitive" – The Call of the Wild, Jack London
• "Loomings" – Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
• "The Prison-Door" – The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
• "The Sound of the Shell" – Lord of the Flies, William G. Golding

Unusual number schemes

In works of fiction, authors sometimes number their chapters eccentrically, often as a metafictional statement. For example:

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon only has chapters which are prime numbers.
• At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien has the first page titled Chapter 1, but has no further chapter divisions.
• God, A Users Guide by Seán Moncrieff is chaptered backwards (i.e., the first chapter is chapter 20 and the last is chapter 1).
• Every novel in the series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket has thirteen chapters, except the final installment (The End), which has a fourteenth chapter formatted as its own novel.
• Mammoth by John Varley, has the chapters ordered in chronological order from the point of view of a non-time-traveler, but, as most of the characters travel through time, this leads to the chapters defying the conventional order.

Chapter Structure

Many novels of great length do not have chapters. Non-fiction books, especially those used for reference, almost always have chapters for ease of navigation. In these works, chapters are often subdivided into sections. The chapters of reference works are almost always listed in a table of contents. Novels sometimes use a table of contents, but not always.

Book-like

In ancient civilizations, books were often in the form of papyrus or parchment scrolls, which contained about the same amount of text as a typical chapter in a modern book. This is the reason chapters in recent reproductions and translations of works of these periods are often presented as "Book 1", "Book 2", etc. (such as the books of the Bible).

See also

• Chapter book
• Chapters and verses of the Bible