Colophon

The word comes from the Greek kolophôn, the summit, the crowning touch: the colophon is the note by which the medieval scribe closed his work, a practice taken up by the earliest printers. The Mainz Psalter of Fust and Schöffer, completed on 14 August 1457, bears the first dated printed colophon, with the mark of the two associates. In incunabula, the colophon stands in for the title page: it is there that one reads, in a few lines, the printer, the city, the date and sometimes a device. In the sixteenth century, the title page gradually absorbed this information; the colophon shrank, then disappeared, before reappearing in the twentieth-century book for bibliophiles in the form of the printer's colophon and the justification of the print run.

For the bookseller, the colophon is the locus of identification: its exact transcription, abbreviations and lines included, allows the copy to be matched to a precise edition in the repertories of incunabula and post-incunabula, and to distinguish its issues. It is described in the collation, with the leaf that bears it, and the printer's device that accompanies it is compared against collections of printers' marks. A complete colophon, on a final leaf that has not been replaced, is a condition of the integrity of an early book, and its absence weighs on the value.

The most frequent error is to call the printer's statement of a modern book a colophon, when it is in fact a printer's colophon [achevé d'imprimer], or to confuse it with the justification of the print run, which indicates a number of copies and not a date. One also encounters facsimile colophons, added to incomplete copies to restore a missing final leaf to them: the paper and the printing give them away, and the collation must state this. In contemporary publishing, "colophon" is used by extension to designate the page of technical particulars, without the bibliographical value of the historic term.