Last words on the history of the title-page,: With notes on some colophons and twenty-seven fac-similes of title-pages

by Alfred W. Pollard

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39 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1971

About the author

Alfred William Pollard (14 August 1859 – 8 March 1944) was an English bibliographer, widely credited for bringing a higher level of scholarly rigour to the study of Shakespearean texts.

Pollard was educated at King's College School in London and St John's College at the University of Oxford. He joined the staff of the British Museum in 1883, as assistant in the Department of Printed Books; he was promoted to Assistant Keeper in 1909, and Keeper in 1919. In the latter year, Pollard was appointed Professor of English Bibliography at the University of London. He was Honorary Secretary of the Bibliographical Society from 1893 to 1934 and edited the Society's journal The Library for thirty years (1903–34). He received the Society's Gold Medal in 1929.

Pollard wrote widely on a range of subjects in English literature throughout his career, and collaborated with various scholars in specialized studies; he edited Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and a collection of Fifteenth Century Poetry and Prose. With Gilbert Richard Redgrave, he edited the STC, or A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475–1640 (1926).[2] He was a longtime friend of the poet A. E. Housman, and a close colleague of the prominent Shakespeare scholars Edmund Kerchever Chambers and R. B. McKerrow.

Reviews

[Brian Want · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short volume traces the origin and development of the title page, a remarkably slow innovation in book history. Pollard focuses primarily on the first ~200 years of printing, with examples from English, French, and Italian books. Growing out of colophons placed at the end of books and out of the ornamentation and scant introductory matter that appeared on first pages, title pages as separate entities gradually came to combine bibliographic information and a degree of artistry.

In all, this book only contains about 40 pages of text, with the rest of the space given over to large reproductions of various title pages discussed. Pollard wrote this in the 1890s (the 1971 version is a nicely-made reprint from a volume at the Wesleyan University library), so it's certainly not quite the "Last Word" anymore, but it's fast and informative even if a bit fusty.