This was a minimal example of a book based on R Markdown and bookdown (https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown).
This example has been modified as per stackoverflow suggestions here (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45963505/coverpage-and-copyright-notice-before-title-in-r-bookdown/48371022?noredirect=1#comment107413960_48371022) in order to add a title page (in this case text and image) at the start of the book. This includes adding lines to the preamble.tex, and creating a before_body.tex.
Current version now works (later on 17/3/2020). Using additional tip form here about how to include the before_body.tex https://stackoverflow.com/a/43057244/4927395