From the issue dated June 22, 2001
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UntitledBy WILLIAM GERMANOWhat should a book be called? Why can't a book just say its name and be welcomed with open arms? Scott Fitzgerald worried over the title of The Great Gatsby, and most academic writers worry over their first book title -- and their fifth. A title,
Yet with fifty, sixty, maybe eighty thousand new books in English every year (it depends who's counting), scholarly writers have a hard time standing out in the crowd. It often seems as if all the good titles have already been taken, and sometimes taken more than once (you can't copyright titles, which explains why you can find more than one book with the same name in the library stacks). What's worse, the books we love often have titles that don't describe anything at all. Admit it, it's only our prior familiarity with, say, The Raw and the Cooked that keeps us from mistaking it for a sober version of The Joy of Cooking. Academic writers can't count on the major review media to carry their fame into every Barnes & Noble window. The title of an academic book needs to say a lot in a little space, yet when an author finally gives a name to the newly completed typescript, things sometimes go terribly wrong. Titling your book Whazzzup? might make it stand out in a crowd of works on popular culture, but does it give the right signals? If two years later no course can be taught without the now seminal Whazzzup? the gamble has worked. If not, your book is toast. I've certainly had my curiosity piqued by the titles of manuscripts that have crossed my desk. But just as often I've been confused, and sometimes betrayed by them -- manuscripts with a disconnect between title and contents, manuscripts with an identity crisis. Many scholars confuse a dissertation with a novel, a monograph with a film script, a theoretical treatise with poetry. This can be a fatal move unless you're already so celebrated that the title should be smaller than your name. Librarians, booksellers, Web searches, and electronic bibliographies all demand that an academic book be findable. In the cultural matrix of storage and retrieval we're increasingly dependent on keywords, and not in Raymond Williams's sense. We spend our writing time under the rules of "Open" and "Save"; our research hours are overseen by the commands "Find" and "Go to." The book that dare not speak its name is a difficult book to locate. A good title has to have the right information, the right tone, the right length. If there's a subtitle -- and most academic books have them -- the two elements have to work together. The subtitle shouldn't be the closet where the author shoves useless words -- or the truth about the book. Book spines are famously cruel to titles that are so long they can't be seen from a couple of feet away. What's worse, the slimmer your book, the narrower the spine, and the smaller the type in which the title will appear. If you want your title visible and your book is short, keep at least the main title short, too. So what makes one title wrong for a project and another one right? While millions of prospective parents have turned for help to What to Name the Baby or these days to Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana, there aren't any comforting tables to help authors name the infant manuscript. Fashions and passions change from field to field. A social scientist's collection of essays on international trade regulations or a quantitative study of the demographics of multiple births will likely be titled "straight" (International Trade Regulations Since NAFTA or Multiple Births in Retirement Communities: Understanding the New Demographics). In the humanities, however, authors tend to prefer the oblique or allusive title. But as a rule, the more academic your project, the more descriptive the title should be. The more your book is for a general trade readership, the more it can support a metaphoric or simply decorative title. Admittedly, this is mysterious stuff. Here are some ways that bad titles happen to good manuscripts. The title is a quote. "Reader, I married him" or "And I alone survived" are famous lines in English and American fiction, and it's easy to feel the author's rush of association as the manuscript is suddenly caught up in the backdraft of Jane Eyre or Moby-Dick. But a book with such a title fairly screams "This manuscript will read closely -- which isn't surprising, since it's my unrevised dissertation." Save the literary quotation for the title of your article in a specialized journal. For the book itself, think in broader, less clubby terms. The title is general -- very general -- and only the subtitle reveals what the book is about. Consider The Black Writer in America followed by A Comparison of Nella Larsen and Alice Walker. Or The Renaissance in Italy and then, hurriedly, Florence, May 1488. Academic writers like this titling strategy -- the move from the grand unifying theory down into the microscopic -- because it allows them both to show off a command of a big picture and the patience for detail work. Yet a busy editor may grumble at this academic bait-and-switch. The title depends on exhausted vocabulary. Tastes in titles change. When words are cheapened by overuse, they need bed rest. So it is with titles, where words and phrases can easily be overexposed and, at least temporarily, lose their power. There aren't any firm rules here, except that no word magically guarantees your title will work. Some years ago, when they appeared infrequently in titles, the words "woman," "subject," "queer," or "other" almost guaranteed that a book receive attention. But these and other entries in the big-concept lexicon can't be depended upon to act with the same force forever. Other linguistic maneuvers should just be retired, like adding the prefix de- (or un-) to a word to make it more provocative. Punctuation in titles is usually cute and annoying. Worse is punctuation within words themselves. Many editors would welcome an academic covenant outlawing the use of parentheses and virgules -- those zippy slashes that show up "unexpectedly" in the middle of words. I doubt anyone ever needs to see another title that's a visual joke on the order of When the (M)Other Is a Fat/her. The author has never spoken the title aloud before submitting the manuscript. Speak the title aloud. If you can't say it easily, get rid of it. If you hear yourself saying, "See, it's a reference to ..." or "It's a pun on ..." get rid of it. If you have to take a breath in the middle of the title, it's too long. Sects and Sex Among the Sikhs is a tongue twister, not a title. The title may be about something -- but what? Many writers succumb to symbolic or poetic titles, often for sturdily unpoetic books. The title A Distant Mirror, had it not been a best seller for Barbara Tuchman, might be made to describe just about anything -- paleontology, the history of any period whatsoever (the Babylonians, 19th-century Sudanese culture, the Hoover administration), maybe even a career in hairdressing. Nonfiction for the general reader often makes this move, but if the book's on secondary-school education in Guatemala, a title like this can be a disadvantage. It's just too cute. Sometimes an author comes along with a title that's good, but just a shade too clever. A serious study of pro-Nazi sentiment in 1930's England could, I guess, be called What a Swell Party This Is, but, the homage to Cole Porter notwithstanding, this title is de trop. (Actually, it might be the headline for the review of the book; as a throwaway journalistic parry, it's not bad.) It can be tough to find that fine line between cute and witty. Your title needn't be lively if your book is grave. Is the nonfiction work you're writing destined to be an obligation or a pleasure? If it's something a reader will study with care, then it's scholarly nonfiction. Or will it be a source of delight? An entertainment? A thumping good read? If that's the case, it's trade nonfiction. The kind of title you attach to your work says a lot about how you perceive the book's intentions. The descriptive title announces a book to be used, the poetic title a book to be enjoyed. True, you might possibly cancel your plans for Saturday night to read the first, and you might require your students to read the second, but as generalizations go, this one's pretty valid. The best index of what titles work is, not surprisingly, the list of titles that already have. Bobos in Paradise, a saucy name for a book on the new bourgeois bohemianism, has caught many an eye. I braked for the title Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Some titles work because they revel in the declarative: "The ..." (secret of, history of, introduction to). Others insinuate themselves no less effectively, refusing to claim the knowledge the author winds up claiming anyway: "A ..." (history of, but not the history; an introduction, but not the introduction). Read ads. Scan bookstore shelves. A book without a title is a kind of literary dream. It's a sweet dream, too: the self-explaining artifact, the fantasy of unmediated communication. But books, like people, need names so they can move around in the world. My sympathy is with the author. Who doesn't envy Plato and Nietzsche for having dreamed up The Republic and The Birth of Tragedy? Gibbon for The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? De Beauvoir for The Second Sex? I don't even mean the works. Just the titles. William Germano is vice president and publishing director at Routledge. He is the author of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books, published by the University of Chicago Press, from which portions of this essay are adapted. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B10
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education