Types of book titles

In librarianship, or librarianship, other types of titles are distinguished in books and serials, apart from the title itself and the subtitle.Let’s see what they are.

Title proper

It is the title of the work, and the one that appears on the cover of the book and not on the cover is valid.

Alternative title

It is an additional title with which you can also know a work. For example:

Legumes, or, the fundamental fiber of life

Parallel title

Some books come in a bilingual version, so the cover has at least two titles, in two different languages. This is what is known as a parallel title. For the purposes of bibliographic cataloging, it is stated as follows:

Coffee and the economy = The coffe and economy

Dependent title

When a book is part of a collection, of a series, or when it is the volume of an encyclopedia, we have a dependent title: The one of the volume, and the one of the collection to which it belongs. Example of it is:

Modern mathematics. v.3 Linear algebra

Title with mention of responsibility

In some cases the author leaves his name in the title, which can usually be: stories, stories, essays, thoughts, reflections, etc. Then the title can be something like this:

Tales of García Márquez

For cataloging purposes it is recorded in full, including the name and / or surname, as it appears.

Contributed title

It is a very rare variant of title. When the book does not have a title, the cataloger, according to the content of the book, writes a title and encloses it in brackets to indicate that it is contributed.

[Growing fruit trees]

Uniform title

When a work has acquired great prestige, or several versions have been made, itis possible that the title takes various forms. In this case, the form by which it is best known is chosen. For example:

Don Quixote
The Quijote
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha
The knight errant … etc.

“Don Quixote” is chosen, which is the universally known title.

Inferred title

Let’s suppose that on the cover there is this: ★★★

In this case it is inferred that the title is: The [three black stars]