The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title-Pages - Hardcover

The text is concise and written with a clarity that shows Fowler unfailingly keeps his reader in mind. Sources do not clutter or obscure the body of the text, while plentiful footnotes reveal the depth of Fowler's research, offering many useful points of reference ... This area of book history deserves such careful appreciation, and Fowler does justice to his subject in this eloquent short book, which will no doubt encourage readers to attend more closely to the conventions, wider cultural significance, and intricate beauty to be found in so many title-pages. (Ian Middlebrook, Modern Language Review)

This is an excellent book to dip into, with informative and appealing case studies of pictorial title pages through five centuries of English literary history; undoubtedly, after finishing The Mind of the Book, the reader will never again skip over a pictorial frontispiece as a mere worn-out convention, but will stop, look and absorb. (Shafquat Towheed, The Open University, The Spenser Review)

Alastair Fowler presents a fascinating study of title pages printed in England from the early modern period to the nineteenth century. A careful bibliography, a glossary, and a complete onomastic and thematic index complete the edition of this work (José Luis Gonzal Sánchez-Molero, Bulletin of the Comediantes)

In The Mind of the Book Fowler has presented us with a detailed but lucid schooling in the history and characteristics of the title page, and a reminder of some of the continuities that, while not always easy to recognize, link the earliest printed books to those of our own age. (Dennis Duncan, Times Literary Supplement)

Alastair Fowler presents a fascinating study of title-pages printed in England from the early modern period to the nineteenth century. He examines pictorial title-pages in the context of the History of the Book for the first
time. The first part of The Mind of the Book explores the forerunner of the frontispiece in late antiquity; the use of frames and borders in title-pages; portraits; printers' devices; emblematic title-pages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially attending to explanatory verses and arcane features such as chronograms; title-pages as 'memory prompts'; and eighteenth and nineteenth-century title-pages, tracing 'the rejection of emblematic and symbolic features and the introduction of unadorned, unpictorial, title-pages'. The second part of the book presents illustrations of sixteen significant title-pages with commentaries, ranging from Chaucer's Works in 1532 through Bacon's Instauratio Magna in 1620, Dicken's The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1870, and arriving back at Chaucer with Edward Burnes-Jones's illustrated title-page for the Works of 1896.