You may read a book front to back, cover to cover, and still miss the title verso. But not Richard Charkin, because that’s where he starts reading.
Title verso – by law and by tradition, every book you read will have one. “Verso” is Latin for reverse. The title verso is the text behind the title page, including always an ISBN catalog number, sometimes the publisher’s name and contact information, and occasionally details on printing history and typesetting.
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Critically for Richard Charkin, however, the title verso is where to find who is the copyright holder. He recently wrote for Publishing Perspectives about his professional obsession with this “most boring bit of any book.”
On every title verso, “all rights reserved” will appear. Charkin tells me why these three words are so important to authors and to publishers.
“All rights reserved means all rights reserved. It’s incredibly powerful,” he says.
“The fact that it’s only three words makes it more powerful than the 100-page documents you see as contracts in some cases. All rights reserved – it means all rights reserved, and rights means all media. It means everything. Of course, the publisher of that edition may not have all rights in that book. The author does, which is why I say I think in a way, it’s more important for the author.”
Richard Charkin has held senior posts at major publishing houses including Bloomsbury, Macmillan, and Oxford University Press. He is a former president of the International Publishers Association and the United Kingdom’s Publishers Association. Currently, he is founder and sole employee of Mensch Publishing.