Framing Books and Reading: An Exploration of Sixteenth Century Title Borders

Abstract

IntroductIon When a sixteenth-century book is opened, the human eye quickly scans to find important bibliographic information — author, title, printer, date — and then perhaps examines at greater leisure the decoration of a title-page border before moving along to the leaves that follow. This process is an intricate dance between readers and book producers and is difficult to untangle with certainty at a distance of five hundred years. The following study explores this issue and argues that title-page borders may often have been designed or chosen by printers and their associates in order to frame or contextualize the reading of the book itself, assuming that even in cases where the author or printer may not have given much thought to the border, the reading of the book would have been shaped by the title page and its border anyway by virtue of its position in the work.