The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title-Pages by Alastair Fowler (review)

THE EVOLUTION OF THE TITLE PAGE IN BOOKS has been studied academically by several authors since the late nineteenth century; alfred W. Pollard, Richard Garner, theodore Low de Vinne, Konrad Haebler, and Ferdinand Geldner have dedicated well-known pages to the subject. Now alastair Fowler in The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title-Pages proposes a fascinating study of title pages and book history. Fowler joins the above list of authors as Regius Professor emeritus at edinburgh University and as a previous professor of english at the University of Virginia, having for many years divided his time between the United states and Britain. His publications include an annotated edition of Paradise Lost (Routledge, 1968) in addition to other volumes such as Kinds of Literature (Harvard UP, 1982); Renaissance Realism (Oxford UP, 2003); and Literary Names (Oxford UP, 2012).

The present book is not intended to be a technical study targeted primarily to bibliographers and seasoned scholars of book history, but rather, is presented by its author as a broadly accessible analysis of the issue. However, it should be noted that this is not an account lacking well-documented arguments. The author provides a text that is very accessible to the reader thanks to its excellent selection of source material and the magnificent work of its editorial design. The most innovative contribution lies in how the history of the title page is viewed from an artistic perspective based on the evolution of its design. This perspective allows us to situate the objective of this work more within the study of frontispieces and not so much on that of front pages in general. Fowler's foreword begins with an express acknowledgment of marjorie corbett and Ronald Ligthbown, authors of The Comely Frontispiece (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). The book continues with the selection and analysis of sixteen frontispieces, all of them from english or British editions, printed between 1532 and 1896.

This perspective has not been the usual one in the study of the title pages in the early modern book. The starting point, as is well known, is the work of Alfred William Pollard (1859–1944), summarized in his classic Last Words on the History of the Title-Page (John C. Nimmo, 1891). Pollard's contributions were surpassed almost immediately by Richard Garnett (1835–1906), who, like his colleague, was surprised at the late invention of title pages: "it must, nevertheless, seem surprising that so simple and useful a contrivance as a title-page should not have been thought of sooner" (Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography, George Allen, 1899, p. 199); he hypothesized that colophons had fulfilled the function of identifying covers since ancient Greece. It wasn't until 1925 when Konrad Haebler (1857–1946) published his introduction to the study of incunabula (Handbuch der Inkunabelkunde, Karl W. Hiersemann) that we can find more in-depth research on the origin and development of title pages. It was Haebler who linked this invention to the setting of a blank page at the beginning of the books printed in the fifteenth century. This link between the placement of a blank page at the beginning of the book and the subsequent introduction of the cover was noted by other German scholars such as moriz sondheim, G. A. E. Bogeng, and Gerhard Kießling, americans such as nolie mumey, and British scholars such as alfred Forbes Johnson, who states that "the title-page owes its origin according to one theory, to the fact that printers found it necessary to protect the first leaf of the text" (One Hundred Title-Pages, 1500–1800, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1928, p. V). And although, curiously, this theory about its origin was overlooked by Ferdinand Geldner (Inkunabelkunde: eine Einführung in die Welt des frühesten Buchdrucks, L. Reichert, 1978), it has once again appeared strongly in the recent works of margaret m. Smith and Ursula Rautenberg. I myself have recently published an article on the origin of title pages in...