A Book's Front Matter

Front matter is the information that appears in the very beginning of a book. The front matter contains the nuts and bolts of the book’s publication—information such as title, author, publisher, ISBN, and Library of Congress data. The front matter pages usually aren’t visibly numbered. However, if they are, the numbers appear as Roman numerals.

The typical parts of a book’s front matter include the following:

• Half Title (Sometimes Called Bastard Title): Actually, this is just the title of the book.
• Frontispiece: This is the piece of artwork on the left (otherwise known as “verso”) side of the page opposite the title page on the right (otherwise known as “recto”) side.
• Title Page: The title page is the page that contains the title of the book, the author (or authors) and the publisher.
• Copyright Page: This includes the declaration of copyright—meaning, who owns the copyright ( generally the authors)—and other types of credits such as illustrator, editorial staff, and indexer. Sometimes, this page has notes from the publisher and copyright acknowledgments—for books that contain reprinted material that requires permissions, such as excerpts, song lyrics, etc. The edition number (the number that represents the number of the edition and of the printing) is also on the copyright page. Some books will specifically note they are a “first edition.” With others, the edition is represented with a number. In those cases, a first edition would look like: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. A second edition would look like: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2.