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I know 'from' shouldn't normally be capitalized (there are numerous articles on Title Case rules here, and here) but I seem to remember the English teacher taught us to capitalize the first word of every line if the headline is more than one line.

So the headline:

A Magnificent and Rare Bodhissatva from the British Museum

if wrapped, should be:

A Magnificent and Rare Bodhissatva 
From the British Museum

Or am I wrong?

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  • Unless you specify a particular style guide this can only be answered with opinions. Commented Aug 31, 2015 at 9:19

2 Answers 2

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No, "From" should not be capitalized just because it appears on a new line of a multi-line title. In titles, only the first word is capitalized because of its position in the title. All other words are either capitalized or not because of their isolated characteristics (part of speech, proper name, etc.).

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  • And number of characters according to some guidelines if I remember correctly.
    – phk
    Commented Nov 5, 2016 at 16:59
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The rules about which words to capitalize are far less definitive than your two references may have led you to believe. At the magazines where I've worked, standard practice is to capitalize all preposition that are at least four letters long (meaning that from and with would be capitalized in titles regardless of where they were situated in them.

In addition we had special rules for cover lines (the headings that appeared on the cover of each month's magazine)—and one of those rules was to initial-cap words at the beginning of turnover lines (new lines of text to hold the rest of a title that was too long to fit on a single line). We did not follow this rule for titles that appeared on internal pages of the magazine, however.

The answer provided by MrMeritology identifies what is clearly the most common rule for dealing with handling multiple-line titles, but it isn't the only rule in use among professional publishers. Furthermore, it is wise to recall that what we're talking about here is purely a style question, to be determined by consulting your publisher's relevant style guide. As the Gang of Four might have said, "Grammatical's not in it."

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