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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
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