The Page Sterne Printed Solid Black
Imagine you're reading a novel in 1759. It's a comic one, rambling and cheeky, and you're getting used to its habit of wandering off the point. You turn to page 73 of the first edition.
And there are no words.
Both sides of the leaf are solid black, apparently printed from a single woodblock (a carved block of wood, inked and pressed onto the paper the way you'd use a rubber stamp). No text. No explanation. Just black.
The book is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. The page is there to mark a death. A comic novel has stopped talking and gone into mourning.
A funeral in ink
The person who has died is Parson Yorick, a kind, unguarded country clergyman who has a habit of saying exactly what he thinks. Just before the black page, Sterne gives him a grave, and on it an epitaph, the short inscription carved on a tombstone. It reads: "Alas, poor YORICK!", set inside a mourning border.
If that line rings a bell, it should. It's borrowed from Hamlet, where the prince picks up a skull and recognises the court jester he knew as a boy. Sterne's Yorick is, in the joke of the book, a descendant of that jester. So the epitaph is a quotation, a pun and a grave all at once.
Then you turn the page, and the book itself puts on black.
Here's the odd bit. Yorick doesn't stay gone. Tristram Shandy is famously bad at telling things in order, and Yorick carries on playing a big part in the book after his own funeral. The black page isn't the end of his story. It's more like the novel deciding to have the funeral early, while the guest of honour is still due to show up in later chapters.
Where the black comes from
It's tempting to think Sterne invented this out of nowhere. He didn't, quite.
Eighteenth-century readers already knew what black on a page meant. Deaths were marked in black-bordered funeral publications. Funeral invitations, memorial prints and elegies (poems of mourning) came edged in black. And in the 1740s and 1750s, novels had developed a small fashion for printing epitaphs on the page, laid out to look like the lettering on a tombstone.
So Sterne's readers had a ready vocabulary for a black page: they already knew the language of mourning. What they had never seen was that language turned all the way up.
The novelty is the dose
That's the counter-intuitive turn. The black page may be less original than its legend says. Black was already the colour of death on paper. Black borders were already standard. What was new was the amount.
Think of it like turning up a dial. A black border says "someone has died". A thicker border says it more solemnly. Sterne kept turning until the border swallowed the whole page and there was nothing left inside it. He took a convention everyone knew and pushed it as far as it would physically go.
Which is, in its way, a better joke than inventing something new. Everyone in on the convention is in on the gag.
A page you can play with
The black page is the most famous of Sterne's tricks, but it isn't the only one. He uses dashes of wildly different lengths, as if the punctuation itself were catching its breath. He scatters rows of asterisks where something presumably can't be said. Later in the book he draws the shape of his own plot as a squiggly line, loops and detours included. There's a marbled page, and a page left blank for readers to draw a character for themselves.
The common thread is that Sterne treats the page as an object to play with, not a window you look through to see the story behind it. Most novels want you to forget you're holding paper. Tristram Shandy keeps reminding you.
The copies problem
There's a catch, though, if you want to see the black page for yourself.
The early copies were printed by hand, so each black page could differ a little from copy to copy. And as the book was reprinted, the page moved around: page numbers vary between editions, which is why it's only "page 73" in the first one. One early copy held in a university collection has its black pages on pages 70 and 71.
Read Tristram Shandy as a cheap paperback or an e-book now, and you're reading a copy of a copy. Part of the joke depends on the weight of ink on paper, on turning a physical leaf and finding it dark on both sides. Some of that gets lost on the way.
What did Sterne mean by it?
Here's where it's worth being careful. We don't have a record of Sterne explaining what the black page means.
Is it grief? It certainly looks like it. Is it a joke? This is a comic novel, the character in question will be back, and the whole thing is staged with a showman's timing. Plenty of readers settle on "both", and that may well be right. But it's an interpretation. Anyone who tells you exactly what Sterne intended is guessing with confidence.
When words fail
There's a phrase people use at funerals: words fail. Usually it's a figure of speech. On one page of Tristram Shandy, it's literally true. The book runs out of words and keeps going in ink.
Which leaves us with a rather lovely oddity. The most famous page in one of the most talkative novels ever written has nothing written on it at all.
Sources
The Laurence Sterne Trust (Shandy Hall), "The Black Page". https://www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk/collection-highlights-categories/the-black-page/ (accessed 28 Oct 2026)
Cambridge University Library, "Laurence Sterne: The black pages". https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/laurencesterne/artifacts/black-page/ (accessed 28 Oct 2026)
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28.2 (Dec 2015), "'Alas, poor YORICK!': Sterne's Iconography of Mourning". https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/ecf.28.2.313 (accessed 28 Oct 2026)
Project Gutenberg, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1079 (accessed 28 Oct 2026)
University of Glasgow Library Special Collections, "Tristram Shandy Vol 1 Yorick black page". https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/teach/romanticism/shandy1p70.html (accessed 28 Oct 2026)
