I have long considered myself a minor connoisseur of the titles of books. Some titles seem so perfectly right, others so wrong as to kill the books before they leave the print shop. What if Flaubert, for example, had given his novel Madame Bovary the title Emma, and Jane Austen had decided to give the title Miss Woodhouse to her novel Emma? Both, I hope you will agree, would seem less — rather a lot less, actually.
A number of years ago, back in the martini age, a group of New York editors, after their third round, is supposed to have discussed what they thought were sure winning and sure losing book titles. The sure winner, as I recall, was Lincoln’s Mother’s Doctor’s Dog; it contained all the subjects that make for a bestseller: Lincoln, mothers, doctors, and pets. Whether such a book would sell well, of course, there is no certain way of knowing. But the editors’ choice of the worst possible title seems to me right on the money. It was Canada: Sleeping Giant to the North. Imagine receiving that little volume on your birthday. One can hear the gentle sound of snoring before the book is unwrapped.
A good title — a title that has a chance to sell really well — is one that stays in the mind and comes tripping off the lips at the bookstore. The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, In Cold Blood – – all now seem not only unforgettable but spot-on right. War and Peace isn’t bad, either; nor is Ulysses, as one-word titles go. Remembrance of Things Past, I read somewhere, in a new English translation now in the works, is about to get changed to the more literal In Search of Lost Time. I myself prefer Remembrance of Things Past, which comes from Shakespeare (Sonnet 30) and with which I have lived for so long.
You don’t want a title of which people can make fun. My friend Marion Magid, who was for a brief time married to the essayist Edward Hoagland, told me that she once went into the old Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue to check on her then-husband’s newest book. “Excuse me,” she said to the clerk, “but do you have The Courage of Turtles?” “Lady,” she reported the clerk replying, “I ain’t got the strength of a rabbit.” A good title oughtn’t allow you to talk back to it. At an academic bookshop I used to frequent, the philosophy table contained a book entitled Clarity Is Not Enough. I could never pass it without muttering, “Ah, but it’s a start.”
I have tried a number of title gambits in my own writing. I took half a title from Tocqueville and called one of my books Divorced in America. In Ambition, I gave a one-word title a shot. I have attempted clever titles (The Middle of My Tether), alliterative ones (Plausible Prejudices, Partial Payments, Pertinent Players), and derivative ones (With My Trousers Rolled). None, I am saddened to have to report, has freed me from the financial wars. As a result, I have come to the dreary and unoriginal conclusion that a bestselling title is nothing more than the title given to a book that happens to sell extremely well.
At the moment what concerns me is what I take to be a striking lowering of the common denominator of intelligence in book titling. The phenomenon began, I believe, with the Klutz books, most notably Juggling for the Complete Klutz, which came with three soft, block-shaped balls and an elementary instruction manual. Other Klutz books followed: The Klutz Book of Magic, The Klutz Book of Knots, The Klutz Book of Marbles, The Klutz Handbook: A Testimonial to Human Nature, the only interesting title in the series.
The success of the Klutz books led nicely to the Dummies books, the comprehensiveness of whose titles seems perhaps a little wider than human ignorance itself: Windows for Dummies, Accounting for Dummies, Auto Repair for Dummies, Beer for Dummies, then — stepping it up a good bit — Bach for Dummies, Gregorian Chant for Dummies, and College Planning for Dummies. I myself bought The Internet for Dummies, which I didn’t find all that helpful. But then, as Barnum said, guys like me are born every minute.
From Klutzes and Dummies, I now see that we have moved on to Idiots. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Entertaining is the title of a new book in this, the line of lowered expectations. Others in the Idiot’s Guide series are in the works, the back of the book on entertaining instructs. Can books for morons, imbeciles, maniacs, and simple damn fools be far behind? Arrayed on the shelves of the charming Dumbed Down Bookshop nearest you one can see the new titles now: Philosophy for the Dim-witted, Sex for the Psychopath, The Bozo’s Handbook of Do-It-Yourself Major Surgery.
A funny country, one that can produce such nutty and superfluous books. What do you suppose their existence says about the state of our culture? Gone with the wind, you might say, if a woman named Mitchell from Atlanta hadn’t had the savvy to say it first.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
