Sophie and the colophon:

I first heard the call of the colophon when I was eighteen and entering on my first full time job.

To explain the background: in those days, if you wanted try for Oxford and Cambridge or a university abroad, many schools made you take your A Levels first. So you then stayed on for an extra autumn term to sit their individual entrance exams and, possibly, go then for interview. By the middle of December you were done, with a gap of two thirds of a year ahead of you.

In a newspaper, I found an interview for an “assistant’s” job going at London University Library.

Then, as now, I loved libraries. And it would take me into glamorous Fitzrovia.

I lived in an outer suburb of London and had never worked further afield than a shop in a slightly more historic suburb, three miles closer to theatres, concert halls and Life.

I got the job — it was basically applied dogsbodying — and, along with it, entry into a whole new world. The Library was full of subterranean alliances, unfathomable codes of practice and, blissfully, a new language.
Including the colophon.

The Language of Bibliophiles

For a first job it was strong meat. Everyone who worked there was super qualified and many of them had been in place for years. A surprising number disliked each other, either on principle over some policy or other or viscerally. As I have said elsewhere on this blog, when I read Ursula Torday’s book Dewey Death, set in a very similar library, it gave me a frisson of recognition.

But they did love their books and nearly all were stupendously kind to me.

I remember the then Goldsmith’s Librarian – pure gold all through who truly didn’t seem to fight with anyone – explaining my very first new concept. The word incunabula, he said gently, was a) Latin b) literally meant cradles but c) in the world of librarians, booksellers and bibliophiles meant books that were printed using metal type up to the year 1500.

There had been a rather spiky exchange in the coffee room. I’d held my tongue, of course, but he’d noticed my bewilderment, bless him.

By the way, Incunabula

I was tremendously impressed. My kind mentor had, after all, explained something from a beloved book that had been worrying me for years. No one else I knew had been able to help me.

Lord Peter Wimsey, when trying hard to sell himself to Harriet Vane, admits that he collects incunabula, which he accepts is rather tiresome of him.

Fellow blogger Scott Grønmark goes further. “He collects ‘incunabula’ (a word which makes one’s fists clench).” This is undoubtedly the best diatribe against the aesthete detective that I’ve ever read; a hoot. I commend it to you, even though I love the chap, mostly. Grønmark is also fair and complimentary about Sayers’s best books.

Encountering the Colophon

It was a different but equally tolerant librarian who introduced me to the colophon.

I had just finished dusting an early twentieth century special collection. She said that, if I washed my hands thoroughly and stood back and didn’t breathe, I could watch her catalogue a new and valuable acquisition.

And she put the book down very carefully on the desk and turned to the back.

Huh?

“I always look first at the colophon,” she said. “Sometimes the early ones can be quite fun.” She caught herself. “I mean illuminating, of course.”

Glug. At least I’d heard of incunabula.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines colophon in its historical use as “a statement at the end of a book, typically with a printer’s emblem, giving information about its authorship and printing.” But for my dear librarian it was clearly more than that. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) defined it as a “finishing stroke” and “crowning touch”.

The colophon may contain a wealth of information e.g. the name of the work, author and printer, as well as the place of printing and the date; possibly even the number of copies. In eighteenth century books, for instance when, pre-copyright, popular books were widely pirated, the place of printing was often the first and sometimes the only clue to a volume’s identity.

An illuminating article in Textual Histories shows a delightful colophon from the the first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In addition to the traditional information, it shows a drawing of Dorothy and Toto, and the illustrator’s name – W.W. Denslow – and his seahorse trademark.

It also gives a link to a modern colophon that reads like the great roll of screen credits at the end of a Hollywood blockbuster. Fascinating for historians of the future.

I, like my original mentor, am enchanted by Dorothy and the seahorse. That is definitely a colophon to remember.

The editors of a splendid modern study of the colophon are broadly of the same opinion, it seems. They have broadened their area of study to consider the multicultural context and cover ancient manuscripts as well as printed books. Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons 1400 – 1800 edited by Christopher D. Bahl and Stefan Hanss has thrown its net as wide as Chinese print to explore scribal practices, thereby revealing embedded relationships such as patronage, for instance. 

The Modern Colophon

But the definition of colophon that my kind librarian gave me is firmly labelled historical by the OED.

The first definition is “a publisher’s emblem or imprint, usually on the title page of a book.”  And there are a lot of them about, as Dylan Brown displays in his Unofficial Ranking of Publishing colophons.   A surprising number are animals.

Image by Sue Rickhuss from Pixabay

The most famous, of course, is Penguin. (I first wrote The Penguin, but then other big-screen-sized cultural associations intervened and I changed my mind. Never say that the definite article has no meaning!)

Now, in his oval frame, he is the symbol of the mighty Penguin Random House. And, indeed, his birth is disappointingly random, according to Matthew Wills at JSTOR.

Image by Markus De Nitto from Pixabay

He was, of course, utterly the perfect image for the People’s Publisher – cheery, walking upright, living in a huddle with similar chaps and seeming to like it. The charming little fellow who danced across the spines of so many of my books became the greatest trademark ever. The symbol of the only publisher that the man in the street could name.

Apparently Allen Lane never missed an opportunity to be photographed with one.

I loved those old orange paperbacks, with the white stripe across the middle and Penguin on the front and the spine. They spoke to me of more than the text between the covers. So they did to other people.

And if anyone thinks the modern colophon is flimflam — Penguin was more than a trademark, he was a mascot and he single-wingedly created the first collectable publishing house.

Another note for the historians of the future.

Sophie