chapter nine

Conclusions

The title-page’s ubiquity and apparent simplicity must not be allowed to obscure the fact that it does a particular job in announcing not only the text but also its producer. An author may be responsible for the text, but the book that carries the text requires a complex set of expensive collaborations. Both are represented on the title-page, and the producer’s name there clearly establishes the book as an object of commerce. The manuscript had been a much more private text package. Its method of opening did not reveal its producer, who discreetly signed off, if at all, in the colophon at the end. It opened with a modest heading to the text and sometimes the name of the author, followed by the opening words. Emphasis was placed on the first word, and especially the first letter, of the author’s work.

How the method of opening changed from announcing the text to announcing the production of the text was a matter of trial and error, although even that suggests a level of deliberation and consciousness that was probably not the case. Printers were craftsmen who ‘designed’ at the bench and in the forme. For this new page which had no model they borrowed elements used elsewhere in the book long before any attempt was made to design it. The first experiments (the 1476 Calendar once again excepted) used a text-page model for the layout, i.e. a paragraph. An incipit might be moved from the head of the text to the first page of the book block, so that the only difference between it and a normal incipit was its isolation from the text (as in the 1470 Sermo in festo praesentationis beatissimae Mariae virginis). In a parallel borrowing, it might be the colophon that was moved to the title-page, as in the title-page for Pincius’s edition of Priscian. Although the Priscian edition is not an example of it, often along with a colophon came its decorative layout, known as the half-diamond indention. Borrowing was also an early method of acquiring images for the title-page. If the work was to be illustrated, why not re-use one of the woodcuts on the title-page, as in the case of Knoblochtzer’s De ludo scachorum? Similarly, if there were to be borders used on all of the book’s text pages, why not on the title-page as well, as in Amerbach’s edition of the Horologium devotionis? Borrowing is a form of re-using materials, and re-usability was the foundation of the new technology of printing from metal types. The economics of book production by metal types was completely dependent on building pages, and then building new pages from the same materials. Perhaps it is significant that when woodcuts were specially designed for title-pages, one of the first was for the publishing world’s steadiest of all sellers, the school textbook.

Quite a number of false starts, and short-lived forms, for the title-page are included in the present work. Among the earliest printed books, the manuscript method of incipit and text was the most common and a few books remained faithful to this method throughout the century and beyond. Elaborations of the incipit and text method were executed in some copies – there were hand-illuminations of copies printed on parchment for special recipients; and for a short period in the 1470s many Venetian copies had hand-stamped borders. More widespread and longer-lived were printed woodcut borders on the first text-page, which constituted the threat, as A.W. Pollard saw it, that the first text-page might remain the appropriate way to open a book. Different locations for the title were tried, and there are a few books with end-titles (although most of these also had front titles), and a few with titles on the verso of the first leaf, in the location used by most of the mid-fifteenth century Florentine manuscript titles. Lists of contents sometimes served as title-pages. Perhaps the most interesting false start is the xylographic title. Such titles were among the earliest to be designed for specific editions. Although they had many advantages in their ability to expand a small amount of text to the right size to fill the page, their inability to be re-used meant they were out of step with movable type. On the other hand, the title-border was designed for repeated use, so it became the woodcut contribution to the title-page.

Ratdolt’s title-page for the 1476 Calendar remains an exception, providing virtually all of the informational content of later title-pages (albeit laid out not in one of the title-page layouts, but as a poem, perhaps another case of borrowing), plus a decorative border. The border was printed from five border blocks which may have been specially made, to judge by the fact that they apparently do not occur in any other extant printing. But the subsequent borders used by Ratdolt were for text-pages, which he used in more than one edition. On several counts the Calendar title-page is exceptional and without immediate influence of any importance.

One of the current work’s principal concerns has been to verify by statistical means the generally understood chronology of early title-page development: the appearance of the label-title in the late 1470s, the first appearance of the woodcut image and printer’s marks in the mid-1480s, followed in the 1490s by a range of experiments, including the xylographic title and the border on the title-page. A Chapter was devoted to the blank, picking up the idea frequently mentioned by others that it provided protection for the unbound copies of a book, and represented an early and deliberate response to the greatly increased numbers of copies that resulted from printing. The statistics reveal that the rapid rise of blanks to a level of about 60 per cent of the books printed in 1480–84, was followed by an even more rapid decline once the label-title (followed by other forms of the title-page) developed. It can hardly be that the coincidence of the fall of the blank and the rise of the title are unconnected. Eventually, though, the title-page became elaborate enough, one might well think, that it too needed to be protected. Does that logic undermine the protective role for the earlier blank? An interesting point about the label-title is that it was not borrowed from elsewhere in the book; it was added by the printer in a modest form, presumably for his own purposes. It was not quite as modest as it could possibly be, because by comparison to the highly abbreviated form and discreet position of the catch-title, the label-title was relatively informative. But it could hardly have had a role beyond identification. The commencement of a wider role for the title-page must have been when some woodcut was added to the label-title – either a cut that represented the nature of the book, or a cut that stood for the printer/publisher.

Whether the title-page was quickly recognised for its advertising potential is hard to know. Today the title-page is not the first feature of a book that the would-be purchaser or reader encounters. At first glance he observes a book’s size and the nature of its binding or cover, both of which can provide vital clues about the book’s nature. Next he may see the title, author and publisher on the spine, front cover or jacket, before ever looking at the title-page. In early printed books we cannot be certain what the purchaser saw first. We don’t even know how often he would have entered a ‘shop’ dedicated to selling books. But we are fairly certain that if he saw bound books they had no jackets, no spine titles and rarely front cover titles. The clues available from the book’s dimensions would be available; that is, if he encountered the book, or a sample, ready bound. It is plausible that the first verbal indicator he would encounter was whatever fell on the book’s first physical page, whether it was ready bound or in quires.

Perhaps we should reconsider Stanley Morison’s comment that ‘the history of printing is in large measure the history of the title-page.’ Can this be interpreted to mean that the history of the title-page reveals how intricately the history of the printed book is intertwined with the commercial nature of printing? More fitting as an epilogue to this study is Wytze Hellinga’s comment that ‘the history of the title-page, therefore, in large measure reflects the history of the distribution of books’. Up to 1510, the storage and marketing of books figured even more strongly in the history of the title-page than Hellinga suggests. They drove its growth: first providing the opportunity, and then developing the features borrowed from elsewhere in the book, from modest pieces of information, to effective enticements to buy the book.