ABSTRACT
Socrates: Aren’t you aware that any document composed by a politician is headed by the names of those who approve it? (Plato, Phaedrus 68)
Demetrius: It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i, 165-6)
A textual threshold can be understood as a political space, as Socrates casts it, or as an aesthetic one, as Demetrius sarcastically characterizes the personified Wall. To explore the applicability of these two conceptions of the threshold to early modern books, one can start with a mechanical question: what are the typical components of front matter-the genres and strategies of this microculture of bookselling-and how do they operate? To begin with, they crucially operated in sequence, and so this chapter will begin by examining the most important distinct genres of front matter in the order in which the Renaissance reader typically found them, beginning with the title page and its constituent subgenres, and culminating in an examination of four title pages from very different kinds of books which synthesize the components available on this one crucial kind of page. Other means of presentation, including the epistle dedicatory, the epistle to the reader, and the commendatory poem can be shown to develop, challenge, and complement the techniques of the title page.
