Title-Page Transcription, Title-Page Substitutes, and
Contents
Some periodicals include a page that is virtually identical to the
title-pages found in books, and whenever such a page is present it should be
treated just as one would treat the title-page in a book.[27] Bound volumes may include a volume
title-page along with the title-pages of the individual numbers. Printing
information on the volume title-page should be checked against information
on the wrappers of the bound numbers or elsewhere in the volume to
determine whether the title-page and the numbers were produced by different
printers (this may help establish the pattern of aggregation).
For many periodicals, there is no title-page: the title, date, and other
publishing information is either given at the top of the first page of text, or
else the wrapper is essentially the title-page (as is sometimes the case with
books; see Bowers, Principles, 415). It is also common for publishing
information to be provided in several locations in the periodical, since the
wrapper is subject to damage or removal. Even if a title-page is present, it
may not contain certain publishing information specific to periodicals, such as
statements indicating frequency of issue, location of the number in the series
(volume/number/date statement), postal classification, and information about
forms of distribution, such as subscription; this information will appear
somewhere in the periodical (most likely in the masthead[28] or on the wrapper), and must be recorded.
In the absence of a title-page, the bibliographer might want to follow the
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) list of serial "title-page
substitutes" which are (in order of preference): "the cover, caption,
masthead, editorial pages, colophon, [and] other pages" (249).[29] In most cases, even when a title-page is
present, the bibliographical description will feature a set of transcriptions
including the masthead and head-title (if present), as well as descriptions of
associated type ornaments and other decorative printed material.
Regardless of the presence of the title-page, masthead, or head-title, the
number's wrapper should be closely examined; the front cover and spine
should be transcribed, and other parts described in accordance with the
bibliography's level of detail and the nature of the information that the
wrapper contains. Because the wrapper can serve multiple purposes it may
be described in more than one section of the bibliography. A periodical
wrapper can include integral parts of the text of the periodical, such as tables
of contents and even short essays, as well as
other matter such as advertisements. It may be difficult to establish whether
the contents of the wrapper were determined by the publishers as part of the
periodical's publishing unit (in which case it is analogous to a publisher's
binding) and the extent to which it is an independent product of the printer
(in which case it is analogous to advertisements not part of the sheets of a
printed book). Given this ambiguity, in some cases the wrapper may be
handled in the section on binding, while in cases where the wrapper clearly
functions as a title-page substitute or extension or contains other information
integral to the contents of the periodical, it is best either to handle the
wrapper as part of the periodical's contents or to place it in a separate section
of the description. As a rule of thumb, if it is clear that the sheets and the
wrapper were printed separately (as might be indicated by differences in
paper), the most logical way to handle them in a description will be to keep
the contents of the sheets of the periodical and the wrapper separate, even if
the wrapper contains part of the text of the periodical. Some cases might
warrant the division of the contents section of the description into two parts
(wrapper and sheets); otherwise, only the contents of the sheets are handled
in the contents section.
