\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{book}

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\begin{document}

\frontmatter

% Title page. Four lines to change: title, subtitle, author, place and date.
\begin{titlepage}
  \centering
  \vspace*{5cm}
  {\Huge\bfseries A Short History of Measurement\par}
  \vspace{1cm}
  {\Large How the World Agreed on a Meter\par}
  \vspace{3cm}
  {\large Your Name\par}
  \vfill
  {City, Country\par}
  {\today\par}
\end{titlepage}

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\vspace*{7cm}
\begin{center}
  \emph{For everyone who has ever argued about a recipe.}
\end{center}
\cleardoublepage

\tableofcontents

\chapter*{Preface}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Preface}

This book began with a kitchen scale that disagreed with a cookbook. The
cookbook was old, the scale was new, and the cup it asked for turned out to be
a different cup from the one in the cupboard. That is a small problem, and it
has a long history behind it.

The chapters that follow trace how measurement moved from the body and the
marketplace to a definition anyone can reproduce in a laboratory. It is a story
about surveying and metal bars, but it is mostly a story about agreement: who
gets to decide what a unit means, and what it costs everyone else when the
answer changes.

No mathematics beyond arithmetic is needed. Sources for the figures and the
quotations are listed at the back.

\mainmatter

\part{From the Body to the Meridian}

% One \input per chapter. Add a line here for every new file in chapters/.
\input{chapters/chapter1}
\input{chapters/chapter2}

\appendix

\chapter{Units mentioned in this book}

A short glossary of the units that appear in the chapters, with the values they
had where and when the text mentions them. Older units had no single value, so
each entry gives the range that historians usually quote.

\begin{description}
  \item[Cubit] The forearm, from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger.
    Roughly 44 to 53 centimeters, depending on the period and the place.
  \item[Foot] Roughly 28 to 34 centimeters. The Paris foot, the pied du roi,
    was about 32.5 centimeters.
  \item[Toise] Six Paris feet, about 1.95 meters. The unit the meridian survey
    was carried out in.
  \item[Meter] One ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the
    equator, as defined in 1791. Since 1983, the distance light travels in
    vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second.
\end{description}

\backmatter

\begin{thebibliography}{9}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Bibliography}

\bibitem{alder2002}
Ken Alder.
\emph{The Measure of All Things}.
Free Press, New York, 2002.

\bibitem{kula1986}
Witold Kula.
\emph{Measures and Men}.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1986.

\bibitem{bipm2019}
Bureau International des Poids et Mesures.
\emph{The International System of Units (SI)}.
Ninth edition, 2019.

\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}
