The first books printed in Western Europe did not have a title page...they had, instead, a colophon (see our post of 5 October 2009).
The first Western European printed book to carry a colophon was the Mainz Psalter, printed by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer in 1457. This colophon gives both the date of printing and the name of the printers, and also states (originally in Latin) that [t]he present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen.
The most costly component in printing the earliest Western European books was paper. Understandably, printers sought to keep the exorbitant prices they paid for paper to a minimum. One way they did this was to use printer's devices as a shorthand for the printers' names (an early instance of what we today call branding). Fust and Schöffer included their own printer's device (intertwined shields, depicted below in an image from their Exposito Psalteri of 1476) in that first printed colophon:
As paper became less costly with time, printers' devices became more elaborate, often occupying a page to themselves, and information about the book (title, author, etc.) gradually moved to the front of printed books even while information about the publisher and the printing process remained at the back of printed books, a transitional process well captured by Margaret Smith's recent book about the evolution of the early title page:
As advances in typography were taking place during this same period, the title page quickly became a place where the printer's typographic expertise could be displayed in a way that would have been disruptive had it occurred in the text. This period also saw the first widespread use of woodcut borders, which served to enhance the appearance of the typography, and the use of embellishments such as decorative borders, portraits of the author, and so on.
All of this is readily apparent in the following sequence of early title pages for Dante's Divine Comedy (the sequence of printings is: 1497, 1506, 1512):
As we shall see in tomorrow's post, increasingly elaborate title pages would be the norm for the next four centuries. They would serve as advertisements for advances in typography and printing processes (especially illustration), and both book titles and authors' attributes would take up an increasing amount of title page real estate....
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