Dear Colleagues,

We are preparing our next exhibition here at Special Collections, University of Otago. A tentative title is ‘To the Left. The History and Art of the Frontispiece.’ In preparing for this, we have discovered the usual definition (A frontispiece in books generally refers to a decorative or informative illustration facing a book's title page, being the verso opposite the recto title page) and a few references to work done on them: Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown’s The Comely Frontispiece (1979; but more about emblematic title-pages); Justin Stagl’s ‘Imagines Mundi’ in his History of Curiosity (1997); Volker Remmert’s ‘Docet parva pictura’ in Transmitting Knowledge (2006); the exhibition at John Wilson Special Collections of Multnomah County Library; Larry Mitchell’s Frontispieces and The Private Library; and a few others, especially via Google Scholar. Some articles have a particular book focus eg. like Janine Barchas’s ‘Prefiguring Genre: Frontispiece portraits from Gulliver’s Travels to Millenium Hall’ (1998), and Donald P Verne’s ‘Genesis’ and ‘Structure’ of the Frontispiece’ (2015), where in the former, the allegorical frontispiece (so termed) in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) appears on the right – and not traditionally the left. Must we consider this a frontispiece?

 

Can anyone in the list offer more specific works on the Frontispiece? Indeed, when was the first known sample printed. And did they morph from illustrated (woodcut/engraved) title pages; or the reverse? And here at Otago we have a 1541 printing of Leandro Alberti’s Historie di Bologna (1541) which has a woodcut image on the back of the title page. This image faces the first page of text. Could this be considered a frontispiece? Strictly not. And of course there is always human intervention – the binder, who mistakenly (or not) places the printed image in the wrong position.

 

As we discover what we have got – and those variants and anomalies – we are having fun. I would be very intrigued to find out more from the list.

 

Cheerily

Donald

  *excuse cross posting* 

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Dr. Donald Kerr 
Special Collections Librarian
University of Otago
P.O. Box 56
Dunedin, New Zealand
Phone: (03) 479-8330
Email: [log in to unmask]

University of Otago Centre for the Book: https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/cfb/

Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand http://bsanz.org/

Supporter of Dunedin’s UNESCO City of Literature status

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Current Exhibition: ‘Parlez-vous français? Celebrating France & the French’   

15 September to 8 December 2017

http://www.library.otago.ac.nz/SpecialCollections/exhibitions.html

 

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‘Happy, intense absorption in any work, which is to be brought as near to perfection as possible, this is a state of being with God, and the men who have not known it have missed life itself.’ - D. H. Lawrence