Frontispiece from Turris Babel, sive Archontologia, Jan van Munnickhuysen, after Gerard de Lairesse, 1679
A frontispiece or engraved title page usually contains a blank space for the title of the book. In this design, the title field, reserved in the standard, is fairly small. The author of this book Athanasius Kircher, a German monk, tried to reconstruct the facts regarding the Tower of Babel and gain an understanding the universal language that must have once existed.