From the exact same Wikipedia link:
Note the underlined portion.
I’m another big fan of colophons. It’s partially because I’m fascinated by typography and partially because I’m a trivia geek.
I’ve noticed them in the back of a lot of O’Reilly’s computer books.
Love colophons, and wish more books had them. There’s been many a time I’ve wondered what font a certain book was set in, and didn’t feel like scanning it in to use one of the resources above.
Colophons as we know them have been around for several centuries, and similar items go back to the ancient Middle East. I think their popularity died off for a while with the introduction of computerized typography in the late 60s. I hope they’re making a comeback.
Please, no finger-wagging. I didn’t say the note I am referring to couldn’t be called a colophon. I was wondering about its special place of honor after the book proper, and where/why this curiosity developed.
So far, the best answers presented: it’s a tradition, and a courtesy to other book designers. I still find its placement odd, in that it sort of breaks the spell the author has worked to achieve, but I suppose you could call it a signpost: “Literature is over, close cover and reshelve”.
But plenty of paperbacks have “ads” at the back for other works by the same author, or from the same publisher…?
To me, colophons remind me of paperbacks from the 60s. The kind that smelled like old books you’d find in used book stores.
I wonder if any of this is related to the credits at the end of a movie. Most of them are entirely reasonable, such as the cast and crew. And a lot of it is included for copyright reasons (like the sources for the music), or for advertising purposes (like “vehicles provided by whoever”).
But yesterday I saw a movie, and among the credits was the brand name (and model number, I think) of the machine that they edited the film on. It was such a fleeting notice that I can’t believe that it was there to thank the manufacturers for giving the equipment to the moviemakers at a discounted price. And there are lots of other hard-to-see acknowledgments in the movie credits. What are they for? Could it simply be a strong tradition, like the publisher’s colophon?
More to the point, for me the colophon is like the credits at the end of a movie. “You’ve enjoyed the entertainment; now here’s a little detail about how it was provided.” (The best analogy, I suppose, would be to the “Technicolor” and “Dolby” logos that come at the very end.)
Also, I worked at a small publishing house for some years, and regardless of what Wikipedia says, our colophon always came at the end.
Edit: Ninja’ed by Keeve!
I thlnk a lot of it has to do with the deals made by producers with various service providers including some credit name-check provision. Very little to do with tradition. In older movies, you were lucky if they gave you a cast list at the end.
The newest fad in movie credits is something called “Production Babies”, a list of first names (“Lucy, Winston, Unita, Sook-Yin…”) parented by staffers during production. Pixar cartoons always have them. Those babies must have a great union.
But I would guess there’s another calculation at play. Every honeywagon driver and assistant broom keeper who gets a credit - and all of their family and friends - is gonna buy a ticket.
Well they were right. Not only did you read it, you posted about it.
Movie credits, as Vashbul pointed out, involve other factors as well. As for “A Note on the Type” colophons, however, they’re pretty clearly linked to the abovementioned Dwiggins in the second quarter of the 20th century, as many sources such as this one describe in detail:
I can’t keep up with the Internet. It’s amazing.
I don’t particularly love typefonts (i don’t hate them either, but I can’t say I find it all the interesting. But I do understand the craft and artistry that goes into creating them, so I like that the colophon gives this credit and find myself reading them (of course the actual info never gets retained, but I do appreciate the skill).
I looked up Scala and I like it. A very pleasing font to read.
But look at the price!
I would love to write some docs in Scala, but it isn’t worth $282 for the set of six, or $54 à la carte
I put effort into buying good fonts for my computer, long ago, when I was planning on submitting books for publication. (Figuring any competitive “edge” might matter.) Typesetting (kerning, line spacing, tracking) is as big a factor in readability, so emphasis on type does seem incomplete.
Later, it occurred to me that paper quality is at least as likely to make a difference to the impression that a submission made. There’s a recent study suggesting that documents printed on heavy paper are judged more important than those on flimsy paper.
Sigh All these are yet more aspects of subtle art more or less swept away by the Internet.
Just for the information of anyone who may be considering this: editors want manuscripts submitted in standard manuscript format. Pre-formatting them to look like books is automatic rejection. They won’t even be read.
Yes, but preformatting them in the specific font or font family favored by that particular publishing house may give an aspiring author a subconscious edge - the editors probably won’t think about the font per se, but as they read they WILL notice that it “LOOKS” more like “their style of book” without knowing exactly why.
Any legal edge in a hard market, I think.
Colophons in the west go back way before print-- this was the spot where the scribe and/or illuminators would get their short say: their names or the date and such. So we could see “This is set in Alpha Grotesk” as the post-1460 version of “Ebbo and Emeterius wrote this at the monastery of Echternach in the praise of God and Duke WIhelm, anno 1050.”
If you look at actual submission guidelines, they often specify that you use standard font types like Courier or Times New Roman.
And that’s what actual working professionals use. The edge they have is that their writing is better. Thinking that a font gives an edge is, sorry, the mark of the amateur.