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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24891
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 **If you need to do this, you should create an in-universe book within your book.**

People have mentioned Tolkien: I've seen copies of his books with beautifiul maps at the beginning or end (always in a fake olde-worlde style to give the idea that they are genuine Middle Earth artefacts.)

Douglas Adams's real book The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy isn't a guide to the galaxy; it is a novel. But it contains excerpts from an in-universe book called The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is an actual guide to the galaxy as its name suggests. This serves to explain some of the weird concepts Adams comes up with, which are at least as entertaining as the main plot.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Hitchhiker%27s\_Guide\_to\_the\_Galaxy\_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(novel))[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Hitchhiker%27s\_Guide\_to\_the\_Galaxy\_(fictional)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(fictional))

Once you have created your in-universe reference work, you can present it either as a separate volume at the end of your novel (like the Tolkien map) or insert excerpts into the text (As in Douglas Adams' Hitchiker series.) This could possibly be done in a different font. I remember one book I read had standard narrative interspersed with Police reports, the latter being in a very typewriter-ish font.

A third possibility, as used in Moby Dick, is to have your story told in the first person, and dedicate entire chapters to the narrator describing in his own words aspects of his world, as a break from telling the main story.

Original score: 1