Word for a ‘vignette’ on a specific topic within a book

I have a very strong, nagging suspicion that there is a specific term for what I am thinking of here, but I cannot for the life of me recall it.

In books, it is fairly common to see brief—or sometimes not so brief—bits of text (and sometimes illustrations) explaining or dealing in more detail with some point or notion mentioned in the main text, or giving factoids or tidbits about something that relates to the topic in the main text. These are frequently set off graphically from the rest of the text by being placed in a box, having a different background colour, being set in a different typeface, etc. They normally have their own, individual headers (often also in a different style from the regular headers in the copy), which show what it is in the copy they relate to.

I’m currently editing a book which is full of these, many of them being an entire page or spread set apart from the main flow of the text to talk about an interesting aside. The authors of the book have, quite unimaginatively, simply called them boxed texts in the manuscript, which seems to me a terrible cop-out.

What are these ‘boxed asides’ called?

I keep wanting to call them vignettes, but I don’t think that’s right—no dictionary I can find includes this meaning. Please tell me my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, and that there is an actual, proper (preferably single-word) term for them.

Edit:

After scouring the books in the office, I managed to find one that uses these things: our old edition of Politiken’s etymological dictionary of Danish uses them to give more details about individual words (in some cases) and groups of related words. Some are just text, some are illustrated, usually with maps or family trees. Here is a scan of a spread that has two of them:

The boxes have a faint, grey gradient background which didn’t come through very well in the scanned file, so I’ve added a nice, pink box around each of them to illustrate. As you can perhaps tell, they each relate to content that is on the page (the words knæsætte and ko, respectively), but as ‘boxes’ they are set apart from the text.

The boxes in this book—given its nature—are quite straightforward info boxes, but I do believe there is a term for the structural element that is function-agnostic… or at least I hope there is. In the book I’m currently editing, they are generally not info boxes, but contain anecdotes, personal letters, brief histories of companies or people or places, etc.

Solution 1:

I think the word you are seeking is sidebar.

2. a typographically distinct section of a page, as in a book or magazine, that amplifies or highlights the main text.

Another example:

A brief section of text or another feature that appears alongside a more detailed discussion of a subject, often separated graphically in a box.

Solution 2:

It's not very exciting I'm afraid, but I believe this is the term that describes the graphic or text elements in your question.

Panels and box copy

Boxes are used as news items or as extensions to a long article in which you can place some other facts or data which are relevant to the article. These types of copy are generally shorter in length and have more factual tone. They can be in a form of a text, bulleted text or lists.

From the design point of view boxed text should be set in a different style than main body copy. Usually in sans-serif type since the box copy is not long and sans-serif type should be avoided for long dense text stories. Size should be around the same as main body copy. These boxes can have their own headlines and kickers. The headline should be few to several points larger than box copy and kicker should be set in the same size as box copy or few points bigger. You can use heavier type for headlines and kickers to emphasize them more.

Magazine Designing

On The Newspaper Designer's Handbook the term is even plainer

Box: A ruled border around a story or art.

Solution 3:

If the text box is pointing to a specific section of the main text, you might call it a callout:

In publishing, a call-out or callout is a short string of text connected by a line, arrow, or similar graphic to a feature of an illustration or technical drawing, and giving information about that feature. The term is also used to describe a short piece of text set in larger type than the rest of the page and intended to attract attention.

A similar device in word processing is a special text box with or without a small "tail" that can be pointed to different locations on a document.