Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ book The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, which explores the historical and theoretical significance of chapters in literature. The book examines why books began being divided into chapters and how this convention influences our experience of literary time. Starting from ancient origins, chapters initially functioned as reference tools, organizing content for ease of consultation rather than for narrative pacing. Early examples include Roman legal tablets and the chapter headings in the Bible, which evolved between the 2nd century BCE and the 13th century, with notable medieval developments like the Paris Bible’s system attributed to Stephen Langton or possibly influenced by monastic practices. The book traces how chapters shifted from informational markers to narrative devices shaping temporality, with significant experimentation in the 18th century. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy disrupts traditional chaptering conventions, reflecting the chapter’s function as a mediator of discontinuous and immersive reading experiences. Sterne's novel illustrates the chapter as a segment that regulates how time is perceived in narrative. Dames’ study also covers the role of chapters in shaping historical consciousness and temporal experience, illustrating this through texts by authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Goethe, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Dickens, and George Eliot. The Victorian novel solidified the chapter’s role in syncing narrative time with the rhythms of everyday life, creating a “weak collective time” shared between reader and story. The book addresses modern challenges to the chapter’s relevance, highlighting twentieth-century avant-garde works and new media forms that transform or dissolve traditional divisions. Dames considers the chapter’s decline amid technological and cultural changes but notes its lingering metaphorical power as a marker of life’s stages. The Chapter is informed by a blend of literary history, taxonomy, and theory, navigating between detailed case studies and broad historical trends. The work reflects a melancholic meditation on literary finitude, the passage of time, and the evolving relationship between readers, texts, and temporality. Ultimately, Dames’ book is both a history of a literary convention and a profound exploration of how we experience time and narrative through the chapter form, acknowledging the chapter’s endurance and its gradual dispersion across new media landscapes.