The New York Post took pains to observe that the author was accompanied to cocktails by “his wife, Véra, a slender, fair-skinned, white-haired woman in no way reminiscent of Lolita.” At that reception, as elsewhere, admirers told Véra that they had not expected Nabokov to show up with his wife of thirty-three years. “Yes,” she replied, smiling, unflappable. “It’s the main reason why I’m here.” At her side, her husband chuckled, joking that he had been tempted to hire a child escort for the occasion.

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Medieval manuscripts did not include title pages, and bibliographers identify them by incipit or opening words: no special markers were needed to recognize a book that one had commissioned and waited for while it was copied.185 By contrast, a printed book needed to ap-peal to buyers who had no advance knowledge of the book, so the title page served as an advertisement, announcing title and author, printer and/or book-seller (where the book could be purchased), generally a date of publication, and also additional boasts about useful features—“very copious indexes” or a “cor-rected and much augmented” text. T