An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations

An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations

Leaving the Colophon in its bibliographical aspects to the able hand by which these are about to be treated, it may not be amiss to preface Mr. Pollards researches by a brief inquiry into the origin and significance of the term itself, and the reason why the colophon for so long performed the office of the title-page. Colophon originally meant the head or summit of anything. It is clearly cognate with , but is a word of far less importance, for while thirteen derivatives from are given in Liddell and Scotts Dictionary, has not one. The former word is continually used by Homer; the latter is first met with in Plato, and then and afterwards only in a figurative sense. Yet it is clear that the word must from the first have borne the signification of summit or crest, for such is the position[x] of the city of Colophon, which must have derived its name from its elevation, just as a modern house may be called Hilltop. Names of this kind, if not given at the first, are rarely given at all; we must suppose, then, that colophon was a recognized Greek word for summit when the city was founded about the tenth century B.C., according to Strabo by a Pylian colony, though this seems difficult to reconcile with the fact of Colophon being an Ionian city. In any case, the word has long survived the place. According to the information supplied by the New English Dictionary, colophon made a brief appearance in English, in the first half of the seventeenth century, in its secondary classical sense of a finishing stroke or crowning touch, being used thus in Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy, and again in 1635 by John Swan, who writes in his Speculum Mundi of how God comes to the Creation of Man and makes him the colophon or conclusion of all things else. Of the use of the word colophon in the particular significance elucidated in this essaythe end or ultimate paragraph of a book or manuscriptthe earliest example quoted in the New English Dictionary is from Wartons History of English Poetry, published in 1774. A quarter of a century before this it is found as a term needing no explanation in the first edition of the Typographical Antiquities of Joseph Ames, published in 1749. How much older it is than this cannot lightly be determined. The bibliographical use appears to be unknown to the Greek and Latin lexicographers, medieval as well as classical. Pending further[xi] investigation, it seems not unlikely that it may have been developed out of the secondary classical sense already mentioned sometime during the seventeenth century, when the interest in bibliography which was then beginning to be felt would naturally call into existence new terms of art. The Latin word subscriptio, which is used in a not very dissimilar sense, could hardly have been modernized without ambiguity. The Greek , used for a flourish at the end of a manuscript, had not entered into any modern language. It is possible that it was thus only at a comparatively late date that a need was felt for a special word to denote the final paragraph of a book, and that the metaphorical use of colophon for a finishing touch caused it to be specialized in this sense. But whenever this use of the word colophon may have arisen, it is manifest that if this paragraph is to convey any description of the book, it fulfils the office of a title-page; and when we examine the manner in which colophon came to bear this special connotation, we shall see that the printers colophon could not, except for a very short period while mens ideas were still indefinite, have coexisted with the title-page. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 56628
Author: Pollard, Alfred W. (Alfred William)
Release Date: Feb 22, 2018
Format: eBook
Language: English