The Title-Page: Its Early Development, 1460-1510 (review)

Even the title page had to be invented. It was not a feature of the manuscript book but came into being as one of a series of slowly emerging design changes that marked the first fifty years of printing in the West. Scholars have variously suggested that the title page evolved to protect the book block, or to identify contents, or to encourage sales. Smith's brief and lucid study systematizes these proposals, uniting them into a single explanatory narrative. She secures the explanation with a quantitative study based largely on British Library holdings, covering "approximately 4200 editions of the estimated total of about 28,000 incunable editions" (48). Within the bounds of that sample, The Title-Page offers a reliable and fascinating history of title page design, engagingly set out in explicit and implicit dialogue with Pollard's 1891 Last Words on the Title-Page.

According to Smith, first came the manuscript incipit and colophon, "perfectly satisfactory ways of opening and announcing texts"; this format was taken up in the first printed books. But because printed gatherings might wait some time before binding, a blank began to be added to protect the book block (chapter 3). A simple identifying label, or "label-title," was added to this blank, apparently for convenience (chapter 4). Gradually, the label was developed in ways that suggest an intention to promote the book. A woodcut decoration was added (chapter 5); more information was included (chapter 6); and entire woodcut title pages were designed (chapter 7). Finally, in the 1490s, the decorative borders so characteristic of incipit leaves in luxury manuscripts moved onto the printed title page (chapter 8). Pollard worried that the evolution of something so obviously useful could have been so slow. Smith shows that what looks from our end like hesitation and foot-dragging was in fact a series of experiments and inventions marking each decade of the incunable period for title pages.

Smith's thesis is well supported by reproductions of significant leaves and by a variety of figures. In the case of the latter, her quantitative approach is nuanced enough to be revealing. With respect to the protective blank, for example, she demonstrates that, for the period surveyed, "there are more editions beginning with a blank than having a printed incipit and text on the first page" (52). By showing that the blank was such a widely adopted measure, Smith narrows the speculative leap that has been required to argue for a publisher's intention to protect. On a less speculative but equally interesting front, Smith uses quantification to prove that the 1480s was the decade in which title pages definitively "emerged" (38). It is thus striking that the high point of initial blank leaves (i.e., recto and verso) occurs right about 1480 (figure 3.3). Despite this clear evidence of direction, Smith is wise to point out that the phenomena of end titles and catch titles (73), as well as the fourfold frequency with which vernacular title pages have woodcut illustrations, all show that title page developments were not uniform, linear, or inevitable.