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Shane MacDonald at The Catholic University of America’s Archivist’s Nook has a post called Title-Pages Through Time – A History of One Page:

When opening a book, typically the first page one encounters is the title page – a separate page that offers several pieces of information about the work, including the title, author name, and publisher information. The presence of a title page seems rather intuitive, but that assumption underlies how common the title page has become in our expectations on the structure of the book. However, the title page’s story is one of centuries of experimentation, often reflecting the commercial and intellectual trends of the time.

Prior to the era of the printed book, manuscripts did not have title pages. The original rationale behind printing a title on the lead page has often been explained by two key reasons tied to the printing of books. The first is that the printed book was a commercial object, and the presence of a title indicating the book’s contents would help advertise the work to consumers. The second reason has more to do with the economics of early book printing, with the printed work not being bound until much later, usually by a separate binder from the printer. As a result, there was a need to be able to easily identify what the contents of a printed stack were for the bindery and possibly protect the work while in storage and transit prior to binding.

These questions of how best to protect the work, how to identify what one has produced, and how to advertise it to consumers were “new needs brought with the advent of mass production.” Thus, when one compares the printed book to the production of pre-modern books – where binding came about right away and works were transcribed one at a time – it makes practical sense that medieval works would lack a title page.

The first several decades of the printed book – the incunabula period – witnessed much experimentation in how to label printed books. In broad strokes, the early development may be highlighted through the following developments: incipits and colophons, label-titles, and woodcuts and borders.

Click through for more history and for some gorgeous images.

I’ve been a huge fan of Gary Saul Morson for a long time (see my too-brief review of his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time here) and I’ve been interested in Mikhail Bakhtin for even longer, but I’ve found him a hard nut to crack, so I was delighted to find Morson’s NYRB review (June 25, 2026 issue; archived) of Sergeiy Sandler’s new translation of Rabelais and His World. In the best review-essay tradition, it covers much more than the book under review, and I found it eloquent and informative enough to post some passages. It starts off:

Scholars speak of two Mikhail Bakhtins—on the one hand, there is the author of Rabelais and His World (published in 1965, though he began writing it in the 1930s) and, on the other, the author of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art (1929; revised as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1963), the essays on the novel in The Dialogic Imagination (1975), and various philosophical works. Since Bakhtin first became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has occupied a perplexing place in his oeuvre because it seems to contradict just about everything else he wrote. Bakhtin’s other works focus on our “unrepeatable” individuality as the source of all morals and values, whereas the Rabelais book makes fun of everything of concern to individuals and celebrates instead the collective. Students of Adam Smith who wonder at the apparent discrepancy between his two masterpieces, The Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), often consider the “Adam Smith problem”; in much the same way the Rabelais book poses a “Mikhail Bakhtin problem.”

After some background on Bakhtin, he continues:

Reflecting his neo-Kantian training, Bakhtin’s earliest works focused on the significance of the soul’s embodiment in a particular time and place, as well as the ethical demands on a person in the “unrepeatable” here and now. Concerned with how people try to avoid their obligations, he diagnosed a syndrome common in Russia: pretending that one is simply acting “representatively,” that is, as the agent of some church, institution, or party that is actually responsible for one’s actions. For Bakhtin, such excuses are always false. People must take responsibility for—in Bakhtin’s terms, they must “sign”—their actions. Responsibility can be neither postponed nor passed on to others because what “I” can accomplish now cannot be accomplished by anyone else. All “alibis” for responsibility fail because, in Bakhtin’s famous phrases, “there is no alibi” and people live in a state of “non-alibi.” When Bakhtin turned his attention to Dostoevsky and other realist novelists, he found these ethical tenets implicit in the very shape of their stories.

Since Bakhtin’s two philosophical treatises were the last to be published and translated, critics, especially in the West, have usually failed to appreciate how his literary criticism doubled as philosophical exegesis. Bakhtin was by no means the first Russian critic to mask philosophy as literary analysis. Before the revolution, almost all the greatest Russian thinkers did so, partly because Russians regarded literature as the most important cultural activity and partly because censors might overlook political ideas disguised as merely literary ones. […]

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Last week Brian Flesser, known in these parts as cuchuflete, let me know that he was in the ICU and not expected to last long (“Have had a good run for 79 yrs, so whatever happens is ok”); his wife Emma has given me the bitter news that his run was ended, and I wanted to share it with the Hattic community. He had been lurking here for many years but only started participating actively fairly recently; he sent me many excellent links for posting, and we exchanged friendly e-mails which on his part usually closed with Saludos or Até (“Brazilians love new slang and clipped phrases. Thus the closing of a letter, fully Até a próssima [until the next time…] is now usually nothing more than Até”). Once I asked him about his background, and he sent this:

Failed phd at hopkins in Golden Age Spanish Philology. Rare book dealer, bartender/waiter for Baltimore slumlord, Wandered southern Europe playing music in cafes for food while learning Portuguese and Italian. Dropped into straight world around age 30. Wharton MBA. Management strategy consultant in US, Europe and south America. Quit job I loved to be present as dad and husband. Industrial marketing and prod. Dev. director mostly logistics software. ~25 yrs until me and x700 best buddies “right sized” com a bunda no ar. So I became a daylily hybridizer cause that’s what you do with a liberal arts degree in Span. Lit. from Dartmouth.

(GT tells me com a bunda no ar is Portuguese for ‘with [our] butt in the air.’) What a pied life! This, from a 2021 e-mail, addresses hats:

Since the late 1960s my head has been subject, four seasons a year, to the benefits of a boina impermeable. It differs from a beret in width, extending out from the skull. Spaniards sometimes call it la boina de ala ancha, cap with wide wing. That helps as a rain shield—just a little—and offers a touch of shade. Looks rakish too, though at my age I doubt anyone notices. If your collection lacks a boina vasca or two, you haven’t yet become a fully fledged mad hatter or Bartholomew Cubbins acolyte.

And when I asked him about his nom de blog “cuchuflete” (I only knew the form cuchufleta ‘joke’), he responded:

The moniker has a literary history. I read it in either Rayuela (Hopscotch in Rabassa’s translation) or some short story by the whacky, wonderful Argentine, Julio Cortázar. When I registered for the wordreference forum, c. 2003, and eventually became the head moderator there, I used it because I liked the euphony of it. At the time, I had forgotten how J.C. used it, but it seemed pleasantly whimsical.

He once signed off: “Regards from Brian (cuchuflete), Emma, and a mob of barn cats including Gatinha, Tomás, Branquinha, Ferri, Ferrita, y demâs reinas y princesas del prado”; I’m glad he had Emma (whom he called “my Royal Britannic Majesty,” she being from Nottingham) and all those barn cats to brighten his life, and I sure will miss him. Saludos, Brian.

I recently ran across the Russian expression локон Аньези ‘curl of Agnesi’ and wondered “Why do we call it ‘witch of Agnesi’?” So I googled and found this explanation at Wikipedia:

It gets its name from Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi who published it in 1748. The Italian name la versiera di Agnesi is based on Latin versoria (sheet of sailing ships) and the sinus versus. This was read by John Colson as l’avversiera di Agnesi, where avversiera is translated as “woman who is against God” and interpreted as “witch”.

That’s quite a story, but I’m not sure about the “read as avversiera” part, because apparently Italian versiera can mean ‘witch, she-devil,’ so there’s no need to charge poor Colson with misreading, just misunderstanding. The OED, s.v. witch (revised 2021), has:

II.8. Mathematics. More fully witch of Agnesi. A bell-shaped plane curve symmetrical about the y axis and that approaches the x axis as an asymptote, constructed geometrically from a circle whose base is the origin.

The first citation is Colson:

a1760 The equation of the curve to be described, which is vulgarly called the Witch [Italian che dicesi la Versiera].
J. Colson, translation of M. G. Agnesi, Analytical Inst. (1801) vol. I. i. v. 222

And under Etymology:

In sense II.8 representing a mistranslation (in quot. a1760) of Italian †versiera, denoting a curve based on a versed sine (1718, introduced by G. Grandi as an Italian equivalent for his post-classical Latin versoria: see versor n.²), by association with versiera female demon (15th cent; ultimately related to avversario adversary, devil: see adversary n.); in witch of Agnesi with reference to the name of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–99), the author of the work translated in quot. a1760.

I posted this to Wordorigins, but I’m still unsatisfied, so I thought I’d see if the Hattery could provide enlightenment:

My wife asked me about the phrase “have it in for (someone),” and I realized it is in fact a very weird construction. The OED says:

P.1.e. colloquial. to have it in for: to intend revenge on; to be determined to harm or cause trouble for; to feel hostility or strong dislike towards. Cf. in for at in adv. Phrases P.2.

First citation:

1825 Didn’t I owe the Major an ould grudge..? I had it in for him.
Captain Rock in London 17 September 226/3

But their “Cf. in for” isn’t any help; that phrase is defined as “Involved in some coming event, etc., esp. one which cannot be avoided; finally committed to do something; (now esp.) destined to experience something,” which doesn’t seem to have much relevance — and in any case, how does the phrase “have it in for” work? Any thoughts? (I know idioms are not transparent, and maybe this one is inexplicable, but I thought I’d ask.)

Dave responded:
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I know absolutely nothing about the Minions; it was only recently that I learned to associate the word with those images of cylindrical yellow creatures I occasionally saw around the internet. However, for obvious reasons I was absorbed by Eva Jaber’s Guardian story about their language and its influence on the slang of Youth Today:

I was four years old when Despicable Me was released in cinemas and the banana-coloured, overall-clad Minions took the world by storm. By the time I was seven, my siblings and I were using The Official Minion Manual to teach ourselves Minionese.

Minionese is, of course, the made-up language spoken by Kevin, Stuart, Bob and company, which consists of a combination of melodic gibberish and variations on genuine vocabulary from a diverse array of world languages. When the Minions shout “kanpai” (“cheers” in Japanese) or “para tú!” (a variation on the Spanish “para ti”), it might remind you of how gen Alpha slang, which primarily consists of nonsensical words such as “cap” and “mogging”, also draws on world languages. Consider the Bulgarian scat origins of “skibidi”, for example.

In anticipation of the forthcoming Minions & Monsters movie, which for the very first time includes a 15-minute sequence spoken entirely in Minionese, join me in breaking down the parallels between Minionese and gen Alpha slang. Next time you hear a minion shout “bello” on the big screen, appreciate how what Illumination originally intended as an endearing comedic tool has grown to embody a trend of embedding sociolinguistic diversity in the youth vernacular.

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I’m afraid it’s another passage from Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers (cf. Abbots and Beavers, Textual Criticism as Rhetoric) — I just can’t resist this stuff!

Disputes about the text of Propertius involve many of the issues discussed in earlier chapters, for example, recension (specifically, disagreement over the shape of the stemma), the proper scope of conjecture, weighing of an author’s habits of expression as they can be elicited from a controversial transmission, the place to be given to interpolation. But because Propertius is agreed to be a major poet, even a great one, the disputes surrounding so many of his lines can also show how textual and literary considerations interact. That topic will be the focus of this chapter, after a brief review of Propertius’ recent editorial history.

For a few decades in the mid to late twentieth century, the text of Propertius seemed to have attained a degree of stability after a period marked by extremes of conservatism and scepticism. The most widely used text from that period is the OCT of E. A. Barber (1953, revised 1960). In producing his 1960 revision, Barber was influenced by the work of Shackleton Bailey, especially his Propertiana of 1956, a textual commentary on all of Propertius that contributed a number of brilliant conjectures but was characterized overall by restraint: confronted with an unreliable manuscript tradition and an author believed to cultivate an idiosyncratic style, Shackleton Bailey often concluded that the transmitted text might well be corrupt but that no attempt to correct it commanded assent. He was also dismissive of hypotheses that postulated widespread relocation of couplets or that bracketed large numbers of couplets as interpolations. Barber’s editorial policies followed similar lines: while accepting numerous conjectures and a smaller number of transpositions and deletions, he confined many plausible suggestions to the apparatus, producing what might be described as a moderately conservative text. The other noteworthy edition from this period, Paolo Fedeli’s Teubner of 1984, is markedly more conservative than Barber’s without displaying the extreme resistance to conjecture manifested by some editions of a century earlier.

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Raymond Chen writes about a man whose work affected us all:

I recently learned of the passing of someone whose work nearly everybody knows, but nobody knows his name. Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack.¹ But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people. Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”

In early versions of Word, the Spell Check feature was something that you explicitly invoked, and then you had to sit and wait while the program looked for all your potentially-misspelled words, and then showed them to you one at a time for a decision on what to do for each one. Word did introduce an Auto Spell Check feature to run spell check when the user was idle, so that when you hit the Spell Check button, the results were ready to go. However, the Auto Spell Check was still a blocking operation. As a result, a lot of users turned it off because it always seemed to decide “Now would be a good time to spell-check the document” just as you wanted to do something, forcing you to wait for the spell check pass to complete before you could, say, save and exit.

Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors). […]

Today, there are red (and even green and blue) squiggles in nearly every word processor, and often outside word processors. Tony did it first. The next time a red squiggle catches one of your mistakes, say thanks to Tony. I think he’d appreciate it.

Thanks, Tony! I know a lot of people hate those squiggles, but I love them (and so, according to the linked post, did Penn and Teller). As a copy editor (ret’d), I appreciate anything that helps people keep their writing free of unintended errors. And I deliberately misspelled the post title so I could bask in the red squiggle it provokes.

I just realized I’ve had a link to this post by bulbul sitting around for months, and by gad I’m finally gonna share it!

In the history of native Syriac linguistic tradition [1], Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn (d. early 13th century) is the odd man out. It is not that he is unknown or forgotten: his grammatical works are preserved in a not insignificant number of manuscript copies and his name is listed with other grammarians in overviews of Syriac literature compiled by modern scholars, as well as his contemporaries. Of the latter, the testimony of ʕAbdīšōʕ Bar Brīḵā’s (d. 1318) Catalogue of Books is particularly telling: where Eliya of Ṭirhan (d. 1049) and Yōḥanan Bar Zoʕbī (d. 13th century) are described as having composed grammars or grammatical treatises, of Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn and his grammatical works we only learn the following:

ܡܳܪܝ ܝܶܫܘܽܥܰܝܲܗܒ ܒܰܪ ܡܰܠܟܳܘܢ ܕܰܨܘܒܳܐ ܐܝܺܬ ܠܶܗ ܫ̈ܘܽܐܳܠܐ ܓܪܰܡܡܰܛܝܺܩܳܝܶܐ

“Mār Išoʕyahḇ bar Malkōn of Ṣōḇā [Nisibis]: he has some grammatical questions…”

Whether this refers to a specific genre, is meant to be read generally or anything else, that’s it as far as grammar is concerned. This lack of specificity with regard to Bar Malkōn’s work as a grammarian is also typical for modern sources. When consulting one, the reader typically learns no more than that he authored at least one treatise on points and one grammar (both unedited) [2], and that in his grammatical analysis, he followed the Arabic model [3]. One prominent example is Baumstark who describes Bar Malkōn’s grammar as “sachlich ganz die Methode der arabischen Grammatik befolgend” (“in terms of content, it entirely follows the methodology of Arabic grammar”) [4]. Over time, this simple observation – repeated uncritically – morphed into a judgment and finally into a condemnation: Talmon notes of Išoʕyahḇ bar Malkōn – and his contemporaries (or fellow travelers) like Yōḥannan bar Zoʕbī and Eliya of Ṭirhan – that they “exhibit either a servile attitude to Arabic grammar or poor coverage of grammatical issues.” [5]

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I ran across the term Чермное море in my Russian reading; for a moment I was confused by its resemblance to Черное море ‘Black Sea,’ but it turns out чермный is an old (Church Slavic) word for ‘(dark) red’ which Vasmer derives from an IE word for ‘worm’ (cf. Lith. kirmìs, Skt. kŕ̥miṣ, Alb. krimb, OIr. cruim, Welsh рrуf). So far so good, but is this red sea the Red Sea? Who knows? The Russian Wikipedia article links to English Yam Suph, a term I was unfamiliar with (though I’d doubtless seen it before):

In the Exodus narrative, the Yam Suph (Hebrew: יַם-סוּף, romanized: Yam-Sup̄, lit. ’Reed Sea’), sometimes translated as Red Sea, is the body of water where the Crossing of the Red Sea happened in the story of the Exodus. This phrase appears in over twenty other places in the Hebrew Bible. This has traditionally been interpreted as referring to the Red Sea, following the Septuagint’s rendering of the phrase. However, an appropriate translation remains a matter of dispute, as is the exact location.

I’ll be interested to see what the Hattery has to say about all this.