The title page of a
book,
thesis or other written work is the page at or near the front which displays its
title, subtitle, author, publisher, and edition, often artistically decorated. (A
half title, by contrast, displays only the title of a work.)
The title page is one of the most important parts of the "
front matter" or "preliminaries" of a book, as the data on it and its
verso (together known as the "title leaf") are used to establish the "title proper and usually, though not necessarily, the statement of responsibility and the data relating to publication". This determines the way the book is cited in library catalogs and academic references.
The title page often shows the title of the work, the person or body responsible for its intellectual content, and the imprint, which contains the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication.
Particularly in paperback editions it may contain a shorter title than the cover or lack a descriptive
subtitle
Subtitles and captions are lines of dialogue or other text displayed at the bottom of the screen in films, television programs, video games or other visual media. They can be transcriptions of the screenplay, translations of it, or informati ...
. Further information about the publication of the book, including its
copyright information, is frequently printed on the verso of the title page. Also often included there are the
ISBN and a "
printer's key", also known as the "number line", which indicates the
print run to which the volume belongs.
The first printed books, or ''
incunabula
In the history of printing, an incunable or incunabulum (plural incunables or incunabula, respectively), is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. Incunabula were pro ...
'', did not have title pages: the text simply begins on the first page, and the book is often identified by the initial words—the ''
incipit
The incipit () of a text is the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label. In a musical composition, an incipit is an initial sequence of notes, having the same purpose. The word ''incipit'' comes from Latin and means "it beg ...
''—of the text proper. Other older books may have bibliographic information on the
colophon at the end of the book.
The ''Bulla Cruciatae contra Turcos'' (1463) is the earliest use of a title on the first page.
[Cole, Garold L. “Historical Development of the Title Page.” ''The Journal of Library History''. 6 (1971): 303–316. ]
See also
*
Colophon
*
Book design
*
Half title
*
Printer's key
References
External links
Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on title pages
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Book design
Typography