Have you ever opened a new book and examined the information on the title verso? I have, and for a long time it was incomprehensible gibberish—what’s that? What’s a title verso? Good question. Until recently, I hadn’t heard the term either.
The title verso is the copyright page of the book. It is traditionally placed on the back of the title page. Verso is a broad term that refers to the left side of any two-page spread, or the back of a single page. The title page verso is therefore the back of the title page. To round this out a bit, the opposite of verso is recto, meaning the right side of a two-page spread, or the front of a single page. Also, this all assumes a left-to-right book layout, rather than the right-to-left layout you might find in Arabic text.
So, have you ever looked at the copyright page of a book and wondered what it was all about?
This is the copyright page of However Long the Day:
Looks like most copyright pages, with some minor differences which I’ll explain later. Most of what you find on a copyright page falls into one of a few categories:
- assertion of rights
- legal disclaimer
- book identification
- contact information
- cataloging information
Let’s take a closer look at each of these categories.
First, assertion of rights:
As you can see, not only do I assert my copyright, but include a paragraph that spells out those rights more explicitly. You can find similar sections, almost verbatim, in nearly all books.
Second, legal disclaimers:
Most novels have a clause like this that disclaims the fact that any similarity between characters in the book and real people is coincidence. An author may also disclaim authorized usage of material whose copyright is held by another party. For example, in the copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land I just bought, the author lays out the usage and copyright holders of several items used in the text.
Third, book identification:
These days, you’ll likely find the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) of every edition/format of the book. You will also find the LCCN, or Library of Congress Control Number.
Fourth, contact information:
This serves a couple of purposes. The Library of Congress requires the city and state of publication to be listed on the copyright page. In addition, publishers want to provide people a way to inquire about usage of the copyrighted material, either because it will help marketing and publicity, or someone wants to purchase rights, or a combination of the two.
Fifth, cataloging information:
This can seem like the most mysterious. This block of data is called the Cataloging-In-Publication (CIP) block, and indicates how the Library of Congress shelved the book. Actually, in the case of However Long the Day, a Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication block was used. Bulrush Press isn’t a large enough publisher to warrant the Library of Congress providing pre-release CIP data, so to help librarians in the meantime, PCIP was provided.
There are a few other things you might find on a title verso. A printer’s key is that odd row of evenly spaced numbers found on the copyright page of traditionally published books. This is sort of like version control in offset printing, and helps printers keep track of print run (and sometimes print year). Bulrush Press doesn’t use printer’s keys because they don’t make sense in a print-on-demand world, but the However Long the Day verso includes a few version numbers to keep track of interior and exterior files used for the print.
You might also find credits for those who designed the cover, laid out the interior, or created other elements of the finished book, especially if they were used with special permission. These credits may also be found on the Acknowledgements page.
Hope you found this rundown useful. Let me know if you have any questions.
