Shane MacDonald at The Catholic University of America’s Archivist’s Nook has a post called Title-Pages Through Time – A History of One Page:
When opening a book, typically the first page one encounters is the title page – a separate page that offers several pieces of information about the work, including the title, author name, and publisher information. The presence of a title page seems rather intuitive, but that assumption underlies how common the title page has become in our expectations on the structure of the book. However, the title page’s story is one of centuries of experimentation, often reflecting the commercial and intellectual trends of the time.
Prior to the era of the printed book, manuscripts did not have title pages. The original rationale behind printing a title on the lead page has often been explained by two key reasons tied to the printing of books. The first is that the printed book was a commercial object, and the presence of a title indicating the book’s contents would help advertise the work to consumers. The second reason has more to do with the economics of early book printing, with the printed work not being bound until much later, usually by a separate binder from the printer. As a result, there was a need to be able to easily identify what the contents of a printed stack were for the bindery and possibly protect the work while in storage and transit prior to binding.
These questions of how best to protect the work, how to identify what one has produced, and how to advertise it to consumers were “new needs brought with the advent of mass production.” Thus, when one compares the printed book to the production of pre-modern books – where binding came about right away and works were transcribed one at a time – it makes practical sense that medieval works would lack a title page.
The first several decades of the printed book – the incunabula period – witnessed much experimentation in how to label printed books. In broad strokes, the early development may be highlighted through the following developments: incipits and colophons, label-titles, and woodcuts and borders.
Click through for more history and for some gorgeous images.
Which reminds me: I believe the first examples of printed Arabic numerals were not in any text, but in the numbering of signatures.
Interesting!
Until the notions of title pages and embossed titles on covers were standardized, it was not always clear what the “title” of a particularly book was. Is the title of Adam Smith’s most famous work “The Wealth of Nations” or “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”?
This reminds me to mention that the Vesuvius scrolls project has made some progress. They’ve imaged “the title region of PHerc 139,” and found that it’s On Gods by Philodemus. Which had me wondering where the title region on a Greek scroll would’ve been found. I’m guessing you unscrolled left to right and read columns left to right, so it would be at the upper left with the short side up and down and the long side crosswise.
The sources I’ve found don’t give a lot of detail, like the Greek words or a photo superimposing the interpreted letters over the image.
They’ve also now imaged an entire scroll well enough to read the whole thing — which is much more impressive but less relevant to this post. The outer layers of that scroll were destroyed by previous attempts to unwrap it, so we don’t know the title. It’s estimated to be from 200-300 BCE, predating Philodemus, which is a big deal, expanding the known range of what’s in the library. But only by so much — it does address Stoic philosophy.
https://scrollprize.org/firstscroll
This article says “In the final portion of the virtually unwrapped surface, papyrologists from the Vesuvius Challenge were able to read: Φ̣ι[λοδ]ή̣μου | περὶ θεῶν Η̅ — Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8.
The overlined Η is understood as a book number.”
What exactly is meant by “final portion” is still not clear.
Thanks. That’s an interesting article. The scroll prize site itself was more interested in technical breakthrough than substance. Perhaps understandably. And several other news articles just didn’t get very far.
I do wonder how quickly they’ll now push through the 600 known scrolls, and whether this will indeed, as they’ve suggested in the past, stir up interest in further excavation that might uncover more.
building on what Brett said, i find myself wondering whether the shrinking of the 19thC epic style in book titling was a result of the codification of title pages, and not just of the practice of printing titles on spines as pre-bound books became the norm (acquiring dust jackets along the way). i guess i’ll have to read the book.
When I was younger, I wondered what title pages were good for, when all the information they contained seemed to be redundant with the cover, dustjacket, or copyright page.
Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that if the title on the cover and the title page differ, the latter is the correct one. Assuming this is generally accepted, would it be a legacy of the time when the title page was integral to the book as printed but the cover often added later, commonly by someone else but the printer?
(I’m sure I’ve seen such discrepancies in books printed in recent decades, but I can’t, of course, think of an example right now.)
In the post cited, shouldn’t that be “an incunabulum”? But it’s in a caption.
It should indeed; good catch.
and found that it’s On Gods by Philodemus
It’s always Philodemus.
Andreas Johannson – When I was working as a library cataloguer, the title page (if any) was regarded as the ultimate authority for the correct details of a book.
Check out the 18thC style, where the author and all his titles and affiliations are part of the title of the book.
I don’t read it that way; for me, the part at the top (in the genitive case) is the equivalent of the author’s name on the title page in a modern edition, and the part that follows is the title. “[By] Author: TITLE.” It seems clear from the layout; if it were all one title, why the sudden CAPS?
For me, all of it up to locis is the title; it’s one neatly continuous noun phrase, of which different parts bear different kinds of graphic emphasis. The all-caps encompass everything on the page except the line of cum privilegio anyway.
Compare Riedls Kulturgeschichte der Evolutionstheorie, where Rupert Riedl is both listed as the author and part of the title. (He was rather embarrassed about that; the publisher had put him into the title without telling him.)