YrSuj1

The publisher's peritext
I give the name publisher's peritext to the whole zone of the
peritext that is the direct and principal (but not exclusive)
responsibility of the publisher (or perhaps, to be more abstract
but also more exact, of the publishing house) - that is, the zone
that exists merely by the fact that a book is published and
possibly republished and offered to the public in one or several
more or less varied presentations. The word zone indicates that
the characteristic feature of this aspect of the paratext is basically
spatial and material. We are dealing here with the outermost
peritext (the cover, the title page, and their appendages) and
with the book's material construction (selection of format, of
paper, of typeface, and so forth), which is executed by the
typesetter and printer but decided on by the publisher, possibly
in consultation with the author, All these technical givens
themselves come under the discipline called bibliology, on which
I have no wish to encroach; here my concern with them extends
only to their appearance and effect, that is, only to their strictly
paratextual value. Besides, this paratext's dependence on the
publisher basically assigns it to a relatively recent historical
period, whose terminus a quo coincides with the beginnings of
printing, or the period historians ordinarily call modern and
contemporary. This is not to say that the (much longer) pre-
Gutenberg period, with its handwritten copies that were really
even then a form of publication, knew nothing of our peritextual
elements; and below we will have reason to ask how antiquity
and the Middle Ages handled such elements as the title or the
name of the author, whose chief location today is the publisher's
peritext. But what the pre-Gutenberg period did not know
anything of - precisely because of the handwritten (and oral)
circulation of its texts - is the publisher's implementation of this
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