I have a book where the forward comes after the epilogue, the end is in the first half of the book, and the index comes before the introduction. What book is it?

(In reply to Other Solution by Lewis)

Actually, the Arabic book will not work. The problem is as follows: English speakers, upon glancing at the book, would indeed be surprised, at first, to find the epilogue, for example, in the pages at the far left (when one is holding the book with the spine away from them). Nevertheless, the epilogue is still at the end of the book and is after the foreword, since in an Arabic book the beginning is on the right, and the end is on the left. Lewis was understanding "end", "beginning", etc, to mean those bits of a book where the actual beginning and end occur in English language texts, whereas the proper understanding is that the end of a book is just whatever part of the book contains the end material such as the epilogue, index, bibliography, etc.

By the way, strictly speaking this riddle is ill-formed. Many dictionaries will in fact contain a foreword, and this foreword will occur at the very beginning of the book, and any dictionary will contain an end, which of course will occur at the end. In a dictionary, the entry for "end" is not in the end, however, and the entry for "foreword" occurs (almost certainly) after the foreword. Note the use of quotations to distinguish between talking about, for example, the foreword of a book and the word "foreword" (the latter contains 8 letters, the former most likely contains much more than 8 letters).

I admit, however, that such pickiness ruins the charm of the riddle.

Posted by RoyCook on 2003-10-09 11:30:44