This specialized volume appears in a series on historical linguistics. I cannot comment on its value to linguists, but I can say that it merits inclusion in any serious collection on early modern printing because it offers a novel account of the evolution of the title page. A team of four scholars led by linguistic historian Ursula Götz of the University of Rostock have analyzed a sample of six hundred German-language title pages ranging from 1490 to 1689 in order to describe their syntactic usages. One goal of the work is to answer a question still open in the linguistic literature: namely, can a title be identified as such just from its grammatical form? Along the way, the authors have amassed useful statistical information on many other phenomena.

The study is single-minded in its concentration on syntax. German-language printing became a powerful symbol of national culture in just the years that title pages evolved from terse informational statements into lengthy advertisements, so syntax is clearly important. The authors are aware that their work sidelines all the other dimensions of title-page creation, including inherited manuscript usages and typography and layout matters unique to the printed book. They do, however, analyze their sample by content and contextualize syntactic forms in terms of evolving design and aesthetic conventions. The most extensive treatment of typographic conventions (punctuation, capitalization, changes of typeface, etc.) appears in a miscellaneous section (5.5, “Particular Forms of Syntactic Construction”) that lists phenomena that cannot be described with simple grammatical categories.

Of course, the design of the database is also crucial to the quality of the results, and the authors detail the limits of their sample carefully. They begin with the earliest fully realized title pages and set an end date that avoids contaminating the sample with the laconic neoclassical title pages that became fashionable in the eighteenth century. For each year of the study the team analyzed only three title pages so the sample is not large enough to account for narrowly synchronic variabilities. As partial remedy they tabulated their analyses in twenty-year segments consisting of sixty title pages each. They included books from each of six linguistic regions where Early New High German was printed, and books intended for four types of audience (private, professional, institutional, and religious readers). The uneven spread of German-language printing means that some regions and audiences are underrepresented in the early years. The sample is equally representative of all regions only from 1570 forward, and of all audiences only from about 1590.

Much of the exposition proceeds through tables or unlovely but informative graphs. For printing historians these are most interesting to the degree that they reveal broad chronological trends. We are consistently reminded how slowly printing conventions developed. Only 56 percent of all the title pages name an author and this information does not become anything like regular until the mid-sixteenth century. Scholars who struggle with the lack of precise imprint data will perhaps be comforted (however coldly) to know that a publication year does not appear in more than half the books in the sample until the 1530s; the place of publication achieves that degree of regularity only in the 1550s; and the printer is not named more than half the time until the 1570s. Often the insights on offer are already commonplace but given nuance by analysis. Repeatedly we are presented with an elaborate description of something that seems obvious to practiced readers of early modern books (for example, that imprint information was relegated to the lower third of the page or that double titles are often bilingual German/Latin) but then invited to see that there was considerable variability across time and region. These results contrast with standard accounts of title-page development that describe and date innovations but rarely explain how quickly or thoroughly new practices spread.

In short, there is much food for thought in the fertile kitchen garden of linguistic phenomena that Professor Götz and her colleagues have cultivated for us—much that can nourish and complicate our sense of the development of the title page, even if we do not feel the need to tabulate the relative frequency of finite and nonfinite prepositional phrases in place-of-publication statements.