Re: Capitalization of Titles

Subject: Re: Capitalization of Titles
From: Mark Wilden <Mark -at- MWILDEN -dot- COM>
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 08:51:47 -0700

> From: Miark <miark -at- MIJENIX -dot- COM>
>
> > As Bill Burns observed, it's called down-style capitalization in
> > which only the first words of titles and subtitles are
> > capitalized, along with proper nouns. In addition to APA and
> > others, the 14th edition of the _CMOS_ now uses it as an option
> > for titles in lists of references (chapter 16) but not for
> > titles in text.
>
> Does anyone know why?

In library science, the reason is to produce a "uniform title" that will be
the same for any reference to a publication. Even in the same physical
book, you can have different capitalizations in different places (the
cover, the half-title, the title page, running titles, etc.).

I presume they didn't just solve this problem by using case-insensitivity
was to be able to distinguish between titles such as

The Book of Mark (a hypothetical reference work about me)

The Book of mark (a hypothetical novel about an important book)

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