Half-title on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
The half-title or bastard title is a page carrying nothing but the
title
A title is one or more words used before or after a person's name, in certain contexts. It may signify either generation, an official position, or a professional or academic qualification. In some languages, titles may be inserted between the f ...
of a book
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physi ...
—as opposed to the title page
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 w ...
, which also lists subtitle, author, publisher and edition. The half-title is usually counted as the first page (p. i) in a printed book. The half-title can have some ornamentation of the book's title, or it can be plain text.
The purpose of the half-title page is to protect the full title page and its traditional counterpart, the frontispiece, during the bookbinding process. When the completed interior pages of the book are bound together to form the book block, the half-title page serves as the outermost layer of paper at the front of the book. Several hundreds or thousands of book blocks may need to be moved or stored for a period of time before they are bound into their covers, during which the half-title page protects the more intricately-designed pages that follow from rubbing and dust.
Archaic uses of the terms half-title and bastard title may refer to two separate pages on both sides of the full title page that have been conflated in modern usage. Theodore Low De Vinne
Theodore Low De Vinne (December 25, 1828 – February 16, 1914) was an American printer and scholarly author on typography. Considered "the leading commercial printer of his day," De Vinne did much for the improvement of American printing an ...
distinguished between half-title and bastard title in his series ''The Practice of Typography'', saying:
The half-title should not be confounded with the bastard title. The half-title follows the title and begins the first page of text; the bastard title, usually a single line in capital letters, precedes the full title, and takes a separate leaf with blankverso ' is the "right" or "front" side and ''verso'' is the "left" or "back" side when text is written or printed on a leaf of paper () in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. Etymology The terms are shortened from Latin ....
See also
*Book design
Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components and elements of a book into a coherent unit. In the words of renowned typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), book design, "though ...
References