In many books — the old kind, actually printed in real ink on real paper — there’s a page near the end that tells you some things about the book itself. Sometimes it lists the typefaces used, occasionally the paper, and maybe even some of the people involved in creating the book, such as the designer. This thing is called a “colophon.” The word is borrowed from Latin, which borrowed it from Greek, where it meant “finishing touch.” That’s what it used to mean in English, too. Here’s an example from 1621: “His Colophon is how to resist and represse Atheisme.”
By the late 1700s “colophon” had come to mean the book page we now know: “The name and date of illuminator, in the following colophon, written in golden letters.” At that time the colophon was a more important part of a book than it is today, because a lot of the information that we see on a title page — near the front of the book — was relegated to the colophon. Books had title pages back then; they just didn’t have much on them besides the title. It was common enough by the early 1800s for books to have both title pages and colophons that Walter Scott’s 1816 The Antiquary could refer to them casually: “The volume was uninjured and entire from title-page to colophon.”
Moving information from the colophon to the title page isn’t a new development. De Morgan’s On the Difficulty of Describing Books pointed out, in 1852: “When the colophon, or final description, fell into disuse..since the title-page had become the principal direct means of identifying the book.”
There are several derivatives of “colophon.” To “colophonize” is to add a colophon — generally, you’d imagine, to a book, although it was used slightly differently in 1837: “The corrected slips of said speech, duly colophonized, ‘The honourable Member sat down amidst loud and repeated cheers’.” And there’s also “colophonian” — sort of. The word “colophonian” was defined in Oglivie’s Imperian Dictionary in 1881 as “related to a colophon or the conclusion of a book”, but according to the modern Oxford English Dictionary this was a mistake based on a single quotation, from 1678: “The same thing is..intimated by Xenophanes the Colophonian.” The mistake was apparently this: what Ralph Cudworth actually meant was not that Xenophanes had anything to do with books — he was from a town in Lydia (part of what’s now Turkey) called “Colophon.”
Colophon (the town) was evidently well known in ancient times for being the place where “Greek pitch” could be obtained. Greek pitch is the dark resinous substance you get when you get when you combine turpentine and water. In chemistry this stuff is called “colophony,” and there are a bunch of related compounds: “colophene” is turpentine distilled with sulphuric acid, “colophonone” and “colophonin” are “oils of colophony,” there’s a kind of acid called “colophonic acid,” and “colophonate” is the salt of colophonic acid.” The only thing really missing is that evidently nobody has ever mixed up a batch of ink with the stuff. If you did manage to make that sort of ink, you could print a book with it — and it would be unusual enough that you’d probably want to mention it in the colophon.
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