Q. Good morning! We’re wondering what to do with the word “but” on the front cover of our newest release: “Present, but Not Counted.” Is it acceptable to cap “But” on the front cover because it looks better than a lowercase “but”? The title in the running heads is in small caps, so no issue there. Citations and references to this title would of course use a lowercase b, but is there a rule about cover text? Or do we have some liberty? Thank you very much.
A. You have some liberty. As your question suggests, the rules in CMOS for capitalizing titles of works apply only to titles that are mentioned or cited in text, notes, bibliographies, and so on. So you can go ahead and put But instead of but on the cover—and on the title page if you prefer. In both places, design takes precedence over the style for text.
But you don’t need to throw out the rules entirely. Instead, you can use the design rather than capitalization alone to de-emphasize words (like but) that would normally be lowercase in a title.
For example, the cover of the 2022 memoir by musician William “Billy Boy” Arnold (written with Kim Field and published by the University of Chicago Press) features all caps for the title words except for of, which is lowercase and italic (and in a different font and lighter color):
When mentioned or cited, that would be The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold, not THE BLUES DREAM of BILLY BOY ARNOLD.