Well, I'm still wondering. I'll just have to have a conversation with myself, then.

There seems to be strong evidence that title pages used to be imposed in keeping with the position of the textblock. This doesn't seem to be the case much these days, though, which seems a pity to me.

Anyone here design books and impose their title pages in line with the textblock? I spied a link on Typographi.com that has a scan of a page from an old book that's designed "tradtionally": http://typographi.com/000950.php#000950. The article is about "Contrasts in Book Design".

There's also a book by Margaret A. Smith called "The Title-Page: Its Early Development, 1460-1510, published by Oak Knoll. Apparently, it's the first book published on this subject since A.W. Pollard's "Last Words" in 1891. Which looks scrumptious.

C'mon - somebody say something!

Sorry Tiffany, forgive my ignorance but what is the "gloss"?

Wow - thank you!

Kaisa, you should look at Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style. He has extensive discussions of the proportions of the book page, the margins, and the text block. These will relate to the title page. Bringhurst does get rhapsodic about a good title page, and I also I think your concern is well placed.

I would like to know the answer to your question as well.

I can see the point of centering the text relative to a wider inner margin in the title page; this is because being at the beginning of the book less of the margin is usually 'eaten' by the binding.

I guess this relates to the broader question of how to compensate for the binding in design. I also haven't really seen good guidelines on this.

I love "Elements". I read it over and over and pick up something new every time. I hadn't noticed anything in there pertaining to imposition of title pages in particular, but following what has been said of it in the past by the likes of Tschichold and reading Elements etc it does make sense that the principles pertaining to textblocks and their margins would extend to the title page. We just see so little of it.

I don't think many people are concerned with that level of attention to details. In the few books for which I've done the typesetting I do have a narrower outer margin in (sort of) proportion to the inner margin. I also center my title page according to these same margins and not to the page width. This history of this, I believe, goes back to the golden section (mean?) of the page and how larger manuscripts would leave room for the gloss.

(from Fact Monster, because I couldn't explain it better) gloss [Gr.,=tongue], explanatory note on a word or words of a text, usually written between the lines or in a margin of a manuscript. In copying a manuscript, a copyist sometimes incorporated a gloss in the text, so that the copy departed from the original. The gloss may be in a language different from that of the text. Old glosses on the Bible have value as evidence of tradition, as have glosses in civil and canon law.

A sample with extensive gloss: http://www.heritagehawks.org/faculty/dbrown/manuscript/Manuscripts/ glossbible.html

Glad to help ... although I'm not sure it deserves a "wow". Paleography was my first path for my MA Thesis so I have a few links saved.