Running heads: what goes at the top of book pages (left vs right)

By Tracy Atkins, founder of BookDesigner.ai and BookDesignTemplates.com · 15+ years of print files, 70,000+ authors · Updated July 25, 2026

Left page, right page: who carries what

A running head is the small line of type at the top of a page that repeats through the book. It is set on the two facing pages as a pair, and there is a short list of conventional pairings. Any of these is correct; the point is to pick one and hold it:

The reason the chapter title tends to live on the recto is that the recto is the page a reader sees first when flipping forward, so the most navigation-useful label goes there. But schemes vary by publisher, and none of them is wrong. What is wrong is switching partway through, or letting one chapter's head bleed into the next.

Why running heads exist at all

Running heads are a navigation tool for a physical object. When a reader wants to find a section in a paperback, they riffle the page edges and read the tops of the pages, and the running head tells them where they are without opening to the table of contents. This is why they earn their place in reference books, textbooks, and long nonfiction, where readers jump around, and why they matter far less in a novel that is read straight through.

That utility also explains why minimalist and literary designs sometimes drop the running head entirely and keep only a page number at the foot. A clean top margin reads as elegant, and a reader moving front to back never needed the label. Dropping running heads is a deliberate design decision, not a shortcut, and it is perfectly legitimate.

The pages that carry nothing

Even in a book that uses running heads throughout, certain pages suppress them. On these pages, the top of the page stays clean, and the folio, if it appears at all, drops to the foot:

• Chapter opening pages. The chapter title and its ornament are the display element; a running head on top of them would compete and look wrong.
• Blank pages. A page left blank to force the next opener onto the recto carries no head and no folio.
• Display pages. The title page, half title, part dividers, and full-page images stand alone with no repeating type.
• Front matter openers. The first page of the table of contents or the preface is treated like a section opener and stays clean.

Front matter also handles its heads a little differently from the body. Where the body might read book title against chapter title, the front matter often carries the section name instead, or no running head at all, and it is numbered in roman numerals rather than the arabic count that begins in the body.

Where the page number lives

The folio can sit in the running head or at the foot of the page, and both are standard. When it lives in the head, it usually goes to the outside edge, away from the spine, so it is easy to thumb to. When a page suppresses its running head, as a chapter opener does, the folio moves to the foot so the reader is never left guessing what page they are on. A designer picks one home for the folio and keeps it there, dropping it to the foot only on the pages where the head is suppressed.

The classic Word failure

Here is the mistake that instantly marks a book as home-formatted: the running head prints on every chapter opening page. It happens because a word processor applies one header to an entire section, and most manuscripts are a single unbroken section from the title page to the end. So the header that should be suppressed on chapter openers lands on all of them, sitting right above the chapter title where it never belongs.

Fixing it by hand means breaking the manuscript into a separate section at every chapter and enabling a different first page for each, then wiring the odd and even headers so the verso and recto carry the right text. It is fiddly, error-prone work, and it is exactly the kind of thing that a book built from a word processor tends to get wrong. Our companion guide on formatting a book in Microsoft Word walks through the section-break dance in full.

Related: Formatting a book in Microsoft Word · Why a book looks self-published · Choosing book fonts · All guides