Book and Library

The ninth entry is il colofone, and the word is older than printing and older than the book as we know it. It comes from the Greek kolophon, a summit or a last stroke, and the ancients used it for the touch that completes a piece of work: to put the kolophon to something was to bring it to its peak. Scribes then gave the name to the note written at the very end of a manuscript, saying who had copied it, where and when, and the first printers kept the habit. Italian has held the word to exactly that job. Il colofone is the closing note and nothing else, and on an early book it is where the date hides, because the title page had not yet been invented. English kept the note as well, but let the word walk forward. In the trade a « colophon » is also the publisher’s small device on the title page or the spine — the emblem, not the statement. So the same Greek summit now sits at both ends of an English book and only at the end of an Italian one.