Penguin Random House’s proposed (and, as of October 31, court-blocked) merger with Simon & Schuster raised concern about the future of competition in book publishing.
Stephen King spoke to those concerns in August when he testified for the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit to stop the merger. In the 50 years since start of his career, he said, there has been a decline in the number of imprints.
That word, imprint, is being used here in a way that may be unfamiliar to people outside the publishing industry.
In book publishing, an imprint is the trade name or brand under which a book is released. Penguin Random House has seemingly countless imprints, including Zeitgeist, Modern Library, Anchor Books, Vintage Books and Plume. Simon & Shuster’s many imprints include Scribner (which has published many of King’s novels), Enliven, Touchstone and Free Press.
In a CBC radio discussion this fall, I heard a journalist say a Penguin-S&S merger likely would mean less variety in the colophons one sees on the spines of new books.
A colophon, she explained, is an imprint’s logo. The Chicago Manual of Style says the word can also refer to a statement at the end of a book “about the materials, processes, and individuals or companies involved in its production.” My New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says the word comes from the Greek kolophon, meaning summit or finishing touch.
The logo kind of colophon could appear on the title page, which is not to be confused with the half title. The latter is a page containing only the book’s main title and not any subtitle, author name, or publisher name – which all appear on the title page. The half title, when there is one, precedes the title page.
One might also find a colophon on the copyright page, the overleaf to the title page. As the term implies, the copyright page features a “copyright notice” stating whose intellectual property the book is. The page also usually includes the title, place of printing, and International Standard Book Number, commonly referred to as the ISBN.
The copyright page is, by the way, always verso while the title page is recto. Verso (from the Latin verso folio) refers to a left-hand page; a right-hand (generally odd-numbered) page is recto.