bookend

plural bookends · alternative book-end · alternative book end

1. A heavy object or moveable support placed at one or both ends of a row of books for the purpose of keeping them upright.

   Synonyms: book support

2. figurativelySomething that comes before, after, or at both sides of something else.

   The cabinet minister's appearance served as something of a bookend to her grilling by the Home Affairs select committee in April this year[…]

   2012 November 1, Kelly Fiveash, “Snooper's-charter plans are just misunderstood, sniffles tearful May”, in The Register

   4 more examples

   In both Episode 1 and Episode 9, which serve as bookends, Burns found fascinating footage of a 1938 event at which President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to living veterans who wore the Blue and the Gray; […]

   2017, Douglas Brode, Shea T. Brode, Cynthia J. Miller, The American Civil War on Film and TV, page 214

   […] radio techniques, including the use of sound montage and the placement of musical "bookends" at the beginning and end of radio programs […]

   2020, Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Radio Nation, page 20

   And it seemed, perhaps fancifully, that those two moments had become the bookends of a generation and of a nation’s frayed sense of equilibrium.

   2022 September 19, Alan Cowell, “From Coronation to Funeral: Bookends to the Life of a Queen, and a Generation”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 02 Nov 2022

   In the factory, a colourful woodland of knitted trees points towards a collection of bookends commissioned from Scottish designers and inspired by the globetrotting travels in 1894 of Dundee Courier journalists Marie Imandt and Bessie Maxwell.

   2024 September 21, Eve Livingston, “‘Students want to stay here now rather than disappear to London’: how design transformed the city of Dundee”, in The Guardian

present singular third person bookends · participle present bookending · participle past bookended · past bookended

1. figurativelyoftentransitiveTo come before and after, or at both sides of.

   Side one has good songs bookended by better songs.

   2006, Henry Owings, Patton Oswalt, The Overrated Book, →ISBN, page 105

   4 more examples

   The tale is bookended by battles – faces meatily pummelled, bones crunchily broken and throats spurtingly sliced as offstage conflicts are placed centre-screen.

   2015 October 4, Mark Kermode, “Macbeth review – a spittle-flecked Shakespearean war film”, in The Observer

   Taking the 18th-century tale at a steady, relentless drumbeat, and with a seductively cool detachment, Kubrick guides you through his hero’s rise and fall, bookended by two sensational duelling scenes.

   2016 July 28, Peter Bradshaw, “Barry Lyndon review – Kubrick's intimate epic of utter lucidity”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   Her aim is to answer questions that “raze to the bone of life”, including the most profound of all: “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?”

   2020 February 7, P. D. Smith, quoting Maria Popova, “Figuring by Maria Popova review – distillation of a lifetime's reading”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   Yes, there are leisure lines to be enjoyed - in the Welsh 'Queen' resorts of Llandudno and Aberystwyth, or the steamer jewel of Douglas on the Isle of Man, where dramatic mountain and hill inclines were overcome and bookended with amusements and culinary amenities for the enjoyment of visitors.

   2021 February 10, Dr Joseph Brennan, “Versatile and functional funiculars”, in RAIL, number 924, page 61

   Synonyms: flank