ISSN 1612-0442
Zuletzt aktualisiert:
11.07.2023
Uwe Böker
Commercialisation and
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[1]
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Terminology |
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[2]
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Although the term ›title-page‹ has sometimes been used as an umbrella for the beginnings of a book, 1 it is by now common practice to consider the frontispiece, or to use H.D.L. Vervliet’s term ›frontispice ornée‹, 2 a separate entity; separate from the title-page, that is a book’s opening, and separate in turn from the table of contents and the text itself. 3 |
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[3]
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The frontispiece usually faces the title-page; but both may contain borders, woodcuts, engravings etc. Thus the definition in Geoffrey Ashall Glaister’s comprehensive Encyclopedia of the Book (1960; second edition 1996) defines the title-page as »the page at the beginning of a book giving the title and subtitle, the author’s name and his qualifications, the publisher’s imprint, and sometimes a colophon and the date of publication. The back often states the edition or impression, printer’s name, statement of copyright, and occasionally typographical information«. 4 |
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[4]
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According to the authorities on the history and spread of printing, such as S. H. Steinberg or Elisabeth Eisenstein, the invention of the title-page (unknown during the manuscript period) has to be considered as »one of the most distinct, visible advances from script to print«. 5 It is, as Margaret M. Smith argues in a convincing way, directly attributable to the economic considerations of the Renaissance printer and thus it marks the first phases of mass commercialisation. |
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[5]
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One would be reluctant to call the following two items (one of them a rather slender pamphlet) bestsellers. But as is widely known, the Bulla cruciata contra turchos, printed by Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer in 1463 (see the facsimile of this in Smith, p. 39), and Johannes Müller’s (Regiomontanus’) Calendarium, issued in 1476 in Venice by Erhard Ratdoldt, Peter Löslein, and Bernhard Maler (Pictor), were some of the first books to have title-pages and Müller’s, in addition, even a printed decoration (the facsimile in Smith, p. 45). |
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[6]
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The Title-page as a Marketing Tool |
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[7]
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Beverly Boyd, to quote only one example, remarks in her study of Chaucer and the Medieval Book that »the title page evolved from various printers’ experiments in the fifteenth century«. 6 We learn a lot more about such experiments from Smith. Her book, a study of the early history of the title-page, its first fifty years, is meant to fill a gap on the fringes of book history, 7 that is, the history of book design. The emphasis is thus on the ›packaging‹ of texts, the physicality of the objects under discussion, its producers and consumers, and on the economics of book production. What Smith ultimately aims at is to learn more about readers and reading practices as manifest in the ›packaging‹ of texts. Her book is thus a contribution to the area of research SHARP stands for, that is, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing. 8 |
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[8]
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Devices such as the title-page or decorative borders did not arrive on its own but have to be considered as an outcome of the first phases of mass book production; thus Margaret Smith carefully studies its emergence by analysing the manuscript incipit, the colophon and the occasional title-page, the blank at the beginning of books, the so-called label-titles and end-titles, the woodcut title-page and the decorating borders added to the title-page. |
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[9]
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The role of the title-page was not, however, so much a display of the printer’s skill than its use as a marketing tool, thus it was »not a direct response to the technological change that printing embodies, but to the economics implicit in the technology« (p. 12). Medieval manuscripts were produced by scribes one at a time and on commission, whereas printing from movable type by implication means printing multiple copies at the same time for a number of still anonymous future purchasers. To produce from approximately 100 to perhaps 1000 copies of the same text (these are the numbers for the incunable period, see p. 17) is a direct outcome of a speculative venture, of an financial risky investment that is made in hope of recouping the costs of materials and labour and making a profit. |
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[10]
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The Storage of Mass Produced Books |
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[11]
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The first question obviously has to be: what were the storing practices of the period (the storing of not immediately sold and unbound copies)? As the stains on the first and last sheets of a copy of Francesco Petrarca’s Epistolae familares (Venice: Johannes and Gregorious de Gregoriis, de Forlivio, 1492) suggest (see p. 20, n. 21), sheets might have been stored gathered by the copy. Thus it is reasonable to assume that the protective blank first page and the removal of the beginning of the text to the second page is the first step towards the emergence of the identifying phrase (a sort of short title) or label-title. The second and third steps than might have been, according to Margaret Smith, an increase in information on the label-title, subsequently developing into the title-page, as well as an increase in its decoration: the advertising potential must have been clear to the printers. Protection, identification and promotion have thus to be considered as interlocking processes in the context of mass production. In considering the title-page as a means to protect and identify unbound copies, and of advertising unsold copies, but above all of promotion, Margaret Smith conflates the theories of those who have discussed the emergence of the device in the past, such as Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, Rudolph Hirsch, Lotte Hellinga, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt or Martha W. Driver. 9 Smith’s arguments are convincing to a degree that one wonders why nobody has come to the same conclusions before. |
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[12]
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Medieval Manuscripts without Title-pages |
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[13]
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Chapter one discusses the problem of why manuscripts, produced one copy at a time, could do without title-pages. Smith casts reasonable doubts on the argument that title-pages would have meant a waste of expensive parchment. In order to explain the manuscript structure in relation to the producer and the user Smith looks into the ›incipit‹ (from Latin incipit ›her begins‹) at the top of the first page, that is, at the head of a text. The incipit usually provides the author’s name and / or the title of the text in read ink (this might also be underlined in red ink; a rubric from Latin ruber ›red‹), the first word, the first line or lines being made bigger, followed by the text itself. The colophon at the end of a whole text might contain the authors name, too, the date of the completion of the text and other information, a kind of explicit (from Latin explicitus ›unrolled‹, referring to the usage of texts on scrolls or in codices). |
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[14]
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Smith mentions some manuscripts that nevertheless might have had a title-page, highly probable in the case of a collection of texts (p. 31–32). She gives several examples of late classical manuscripts, amongst them collections of plays by Terence. |
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Unfortunately there is no mention of the famous early fourteenth-century English Auchinleck manuscript, an anthology of at least 60 numbered items (more than 331 leaves, produced between c. 1330 and 1340). 10 This is a book of miscellaneous writings, dominated, however, by popular metrical romances in the native tongue for wealthy middle-class citizens and thus vastly different from manuscripts of mostly classical texts discussed by Smith. There were obviously six different scribes involved working collaboratively in a lay scriptorum. 11 As the first scribe’s catchwords provide links for the work of every other scribe, he may have had an important editorial role in producing the manuscript (being the editor or even the dealer). There are titles for most items, perhaps added (some squeezed in) as an afterthought. As the whole manuscript gives the appearance of unity (although the Arabic foliation was done later, the items were numbered with roman numerals 12 ), there might have been a predetermined design. 13 There are strong reasons to think that the individual parts (booklets) were produced to be bound together. One might ask: would there not have been some sort of a table of contents as well as a title-page for such a massive book? Unfortunately, as the first five items have been lost from the opening of the manuscript we can only speculate. |
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[16]
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It would on the other hand have been even more interesting to look into the manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (82 all together) 14 and the early printed editions, done by William Caxton (1478, 1484), Richard Pynson (1492) and Wynkyn de Worde (1498). 15 Caxton began with copying texts, but »for as moche as in the wrytyng of the same my penne is worn, myn hande wery and not stedfast, myn eyen dimmed with overmoche lokyng on the whit paper«, 16 he began to learn the art of printing, relying on traditional techniques – but one would like to learn more about his followers’ arguments for supplying a title-page. The first to use a title-page was Wynkyn de Worde who printed The boke of Chaucer named Canterbury tales. 17 |
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[17]
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To come back to Smith’s historical account. It was only during the second half of the fifteenth century that some manuscripts produced in Florence by Vespasiano da Bisticci for collectors such as the Medici and the Duke of Urbino used »incipit pages« (p. 32). There is also an example of a rectangular title-page that looks like an inscription on a sarcophagus or a wall monument. As these title-pages (occurring on the first verso of a book, not on the recto) are found in luxury manuscripts, they cannot be related to the mass production and the devices that were introduced simultaneously. |
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[18]
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The Title-pages of the Earliest Books |
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[19]
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The earliest printers, however, followed the manuscript practice, beginning their books with an incipit and closing with an explicit or colophon (the most famous amongst them the Gutenberg Bible). Smith’s discussion of early examples of title-pages include the two above-mentioned texts, Schoeffer’s and Fust’s Bulla cruciata contra turchos, and Regiomontanus’ Calendarium. As the title can be found only in some copies of the Latin edition and as Schoeffer, like Arnold ther Hoernen (see p. 41), did not use title-pages frequently after 1463, he has been called »an inventor who did not realise the importance of his invention« (p. 40). Smith is, however, like others, unable to give any reasons for such inconsistency. One might ask, in the context of Smith’s overall thesis: was the papal Bull, a political pamphlet of only six leaves, calling for a crusade against the Turks, really in need of a title-page out of storage or general commercial considerations? |
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[20]
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Regiomontanus’ Calendarium is a different case. There are three editions, a Latin and an Italian one appearing in 1476, the German edition being published in 1478. This might indicate that the Calendarium was a ›popular‹ book, and the printer, in addition, made use of decorative borders. According to Douglas McMurtrie 18 the title-page information might be said to resemble a publisher’s blurb. |
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[21]
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Amongst the books published some time later, but before 1480, there is the 1479 edition of Aesop printed in Verona. The first page has, according to Smith, »a woodcut presentation scene in which a kneeling man, presumably the translator Accio Zuccho, is handing a book to a seated figure who has a laurel wreath on his head« (p. 46). 19 According to Margery Corbett this clearly resembles the later »architectural title-page«. 20 While the figure with the laurel wreath hints at the institution of the poeta laureatus, the presentation scene as such is, however, reminiscent of earlier practices during the manuscript period. All sorts of objects, including books, were presented in this way to a patron: authors are kneeling at the feet of some patron in order to offer him his work, as for instance Lydgate does giving the book of The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man to the Earl of Salisbury. Jean Froissart is describing the act of presentation in detail in his Chronicles. One might interpret such presentation not only as an act of final publication, but also as a donation in the hope of receiving some material or immaterial reward. 21 The woodcut presentation scene under discussion is thus a definite link with the past, as so many devices and practices during these early years of printing are. |
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[22]
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From the Blank to the Title-page proper |
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[23]
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In chapter three Smith looks into the gradual disappearance of the incipit and the use of blanks that surpassed the editions with incipit-and-text shortly after 1470. After 1490, titles had become much more common than blanks, calculated (for the first time ever by Smith) on the basis of 4,200 items of the total of about 28,000 incunable editions included in the Gesamkatalog der Wiegendrucke (see 48, p. 51, graphs on p. 50). The emergence of the blank (peaking in 1480–84), and its disappearance (of the blank recto of the first leaf, and the blank leaf, that is, the recto and verso of the first leaf) is thoroughly discussed in relation to the usual work in a printing house (although again not directly under the aspect of mass production), and is interpreted as a device of moving the title information to the blank, the function of which then became the label-title, that is being discussed in chapter four (for a definition of the label-title, see p. 59–60). The label-title, carrying a minimum of information and lacking visual interest, is seen as nothing more than an identifier for the printer on his premises (in some cases called ›vacat‹ or ›prima alba‹ in a book’s register), rather than as a device to attract the attention of the purchaser (see the facsimile of Jordanus de Quedlinburg, Postillae de tempore et sermones, Strassburg [Georg Husner] 1483, on p. 65). |
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[24]
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The Woodcut |
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[25]
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With chapter four we arrive at the more interesting parts of the book: the label-title is supplemented by a woodcut, indicating the subject of a book and providing the purchaser with information about the printer / publisher (chapter six). The next stages are the xylographic title-page entirely printed from woodblocks (chapter seven), and the beginnings of the woodcut title-border (chapter eight). |
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[26]
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Woodcuts are clearly important aspects of book design, as they are expensive investments. Although they were commonly re-used, perhaps in a slightly changed form, for books of a different subject, they emphasize the economic side of book production. »An attractive or an informative title-page could help sell the book, and / or boost the producer’s business and reputation« (p. 78). Again facsimiles of early examples help the reader to follow Smith’s arguments (see pp. 82–86). It now becomes evident that the growth of information on the title-page, identifying the printer, the publisher, the bookseller (and his address), the place and year of publication etc., make claims for the book’s value (clearly the beginnings of the publisher’s blurb). Last but not least, the use of borders on the title-page is a direct outcome of the commercial aspects of book production. |
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[27]
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The Frontispiece |
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[28]
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Although Smith analyses several examples of title-page borders that are architectural in nature (p. 136 ff.), she does not go into the use of the frontispiece on a more general level. Her book is limited to the period from 1460–1510, and she does not discuss later developments. One certainly has to consider the frontispiece as a separate entity; separate from title-page as a book’s opening. Nevertheless, under the aspect of commercialisation, the use of the title-page, illustrated by woodcuts, and the introduction of the frontispiece have to be reconsidered together. |
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[29]
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The important further step of a book’s commercial promotion was the emergence of the emblematic title-page ornamented with allusive and learned images, emblems or visual symbols as »a second language«. 22 From an aesthetic point of view one might distinguish between four types of designs, either dividing the title-page into geometrical compartments, showing a single overall design, a cartouche design animated by characters from the classical world, or using an architectural device like the ›Triumphant Arch‹ on the title-page of Michael Drayton’s Poly-olbion, or a chorographical Description of Great Britain (1612–1622). 23 These architectural title-pages in the form of a monument celebrate the fame of the author or honour the subject. 24 Behind this design might be the intimate relationship between building and writing as expressed in »An Epigram explaining the Frontispiece of this Worke« in John Guillim’s A Displaye of Heraldrie (1610): ›The noble Pindare doth compare somewhere, / Writing with Building, and instructs vs there, / That euery great and goodly Edifice, / Doth aske to haue a comely Frontispiece‹. 25 |
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[30]
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Emblems, symbols and other allegorical devices were considered to embody some hidden meaning, asking the learned reader to work that meaning out by himself. 26 As early as 1565 Hadrianus Junius remarked in his Emblemata that emblems in general »keep the reader’s mind in suspense and surmise [...], draw him to admiration with an increase of delight, especially when they conceal in a pleasant obscurity, as if beneath a veil, something of solid excellence under apt and subtle inventions«. 27 It is true that emblematic title-pages served as a means »to communicate complex ideas by means of visual images«; 28 but the ultimate end of including elaborate designs must have been an economic one. 29 They added symbolic value to a book on the market, however restricted the readership might have been; printing was an industrial process that required a considerable amount of capital and the co-ordination of several producing and distributing craftsmen. 30 |
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[31]
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Margaret Smith’s careful and well-argued analysis gives an insight into this industrial process, focussing in great detail on the title-page. One might add, that there are more than 50 facsimiles of title-pages and illustrations from manuscripts, as well as a useful glossary of terms and their usage by different scholars and / or disciplines. The four-pages index might, however, have been more detailed: unfortunately you won’t find entries for Aesop, Cicero, or Patrarca, to mention only a few names. |
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Prof. Dr. Uwe Böker
Ins Netz gestellt am 26.11.2004
IASLonline ISSN 1612-0442
Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved. Diese Rezension wurde betreut von der Redaktion IASLonline. Sie finden den Text auch angezeigt im Portal Lirez – Literaturwissenschaftliche Rezensionen. Redaktionell betreut wurde diese Rezension von Lena Grundhuber. Empfohlene Zitierweise: |
Anmerkungen |
| 1 |
Smith: Title-page, p. 13. zurück
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| 2 |
H. D. L. Vervliet: Les origines du frontispice architectural. In: Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 1958, pp. 222–31. zurück
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| 3 |
Smith: Title-page, pp. 14–15. Smith agrees with R. B. McKerrow in that ›a title-page [is] a separate page setting forth in a conspicuous manner the title of the book which follows it, and not containing any part of the book itself‹; see R. B. McKerrow: An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1927, p. 88. zurück
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| 4 |
Geoffrey Ashall Glaister: Encyclopedia of the Book, second edition with a new introduction by Donald Farren. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, and London: The British Library 1996 (first ed. 1960), p. 477. zurück
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| 5 |
See S. H. Steinberg: Five Hundred Years of Printing. 3rd edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974, p. 145; Elisabeth Eisenstein: The Printing Press as an Agent of Chance. 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970, vol. I, p. 106. See also Smith, p. 25, n. 1. zurück
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| 6 |
Beverly Boyd: Chaucer and the Medieval Book. San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library 1973, p. 21. zurück
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| 7 |
See Lotte Hellinga / J. B. Trapp (eds.): The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. III. 1400–1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and the review by Thomas Keiderling: Die Etablierung des gedruckten Buches in Großbritannien. In: IASL-Online. URL: http://www.iaslonline.uni-muenchen.de/rezensio/liste/keiderli.html (12.02.2002). zurück
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| 8 |
See the society's quarterly newsletter, distributed to its members, and the scholarly annual and the latest issue: Book History 7 (2004). See the SHARP web: http://sharpweb.ord. zurück
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| 9 |
See the bibliographical information in Smith, p. 16, n. 14. zurück
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| 10 |
See: The Auchinleck Manuscript. National Library of Scotland Advocates' MS. 19.2.1, with an introduction by Derek Pearsall & I. C. Cunningham. London: The Scholar Press, in association with The National Library of Scotland 1977, p. vii. See also T. A. Shonk: A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript. Bookmen and Bookmaking in the Early Fourteenth Century. In: Speculum 60 (1985), pp. 71–91; Alison Wiggins: The Auchinleck Manuscript (Version 1.1.; 5 July 2003), URL: http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/editorial/physical.html#foliation (07.10.04). zurück
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| 11 |
See L. H. Loomis: The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330–1340. In: Publications of the Modern Language Association 57 (1942), pp. 995–627. See Shonk: p. 71, who is of the opinion that the scribes were not necessarily copying under one roof and under the immediate supervision of the overall organizer. zurück
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| 12 |
See Shonk: p. 84. zurück
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| 13 |
See Shonk: p. 77f. zurück
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| 14 |
There is on the first page of the Hengwrt manuscript (National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, Peniarth 392D), the earliest surviving manuscript dating from c. 1400–1410, an incipit formula: ›Here begynneth the book of the tales of canterbury‹. The ›title‹ is removed to a prominent place above or outside the four-sided border-decorations surrounding the first text-page. Whereas the incipt of Schott's edition of Otto von Passau: Die vierundzwanzig Alten ([Strassburg]: Martin Schott 1483; fasimile in Smith, p. 129) is still on the inside of the decorative borders. zurück
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| 15 |
See Derek Pearsall: Date and Manuscripts. In his: The Canterbury Tales. London: Unwin Hyman 1985, p. 8. For the list of principal editions, see Pearsall, p. 325. zurück
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| 16 |
Quoted in Boyd: Chaucer, p. 119. zurück
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| 17 |
See Boyd (p. 134) according to whom the Book against the pestilence by the Swedish bishop Canutus, printed by William de Machilinia at an unknown date before 1490, was the first to use a title-page in England. zurück
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| 18 |
See Douglas McMurtrie: The Book. First edition 1943 repr. London: Bracken Books 1989; see Smith, p. 44. zurück
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| 19 |
There is a similar engraving showing William Caxton presenting his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye to his patron Margaret of Burgundy; it is tipped in as frontispiece of the Huntington Library's copy. The engraving is reproduced on the title-page of Boyd's study of Chaucer and the Medieval Book. zurück
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| 20 |
Margery Corbett: The Architectural Title-page. An Attempt to trace its development from its humanist origins up to the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries, the Heyday of the Complex Engraved Title-page. In: Motif 12 (1964), pp. 48–62. See Smith, p. 46. zurück
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| 21 |
See Uwe Böker: The Epistle Mendicant in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. The Sociology and Poetics of a Genre. In: Uwe Böker / Manfred Marks / Rainer Schöwerling (eds.): The Living Middle Ages. Studies in Mediaeveal English Literature and Its Tradition. A Festschrift for Karl Heinz Göller. Stuttgart: Belser 1989, pp. 137–165, here pp. 143–44. zurück
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| 22 |
Margery Corbett / Ronald Lightbown: The Comely Frontispiece. The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550–1660. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1979, p. 1. zurück
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| 23 |
Ibid., p. 3. See chap. 13 on Drayton and the illustration on p. 152. zurück
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| 24 |
Ibid., pp. 8–9. zurück
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| 25 |
Quot. ibid., p. 9. zurück
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| 26 |
Ibid., p. 18. zurück
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| 27 |
Quot. ibid. zurück
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| 28 |
Ibid., p. 34. zurück
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| 29 |
See Annette Frese: Barocke Titelgraphik am Beispiel der Verlagsstadt Köln (1570–1700). Funktion, Sujet, Typologie. Köln / Wien: Böhlau 1989, p. 9. Frese mentions the tendency to include enigmatic title-pages that were meant to induce the readers to buy such books (p. 54). See also the quotation from the German poet Georg Friedrich Harsdörffer (p. 62). zurück
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| 30 |
For a similar approach, see Cynthia J. Brown: The Interaction between Author and Printer. Title Pages and Colophons of Early French Imprints. In: Soundings 33/no. 29 (1992), pp. 33–53, on the early French works of Pierre Gringore and the economic reasons dictating the layout of his books' openings. zurück
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