The paper focuses on the afterwords accompanying officially published works in the period from 1948 to 1989 and presents the ways and means by which these paratexts set up their readers. It looks at three strands defined on the basis of how they work with the material: the reader of the afterword as a reader of the primary text, the reader of the afterword as a reader of the works of a given author or texts from a given culture/ linguistic area, and lastly the reader of the afterword in general.