Book titles

Alliteration is pleasing:

Nicholas Nickleby

Pride and Prejudice

The Woman in White

And so is repetition:

Man and Superman

Beasts and Super-Beasts

(Though it’s a parody, Saki’s is perhaps the most delightful book title of all.)

Surely one of the greatest titlers is Robert Louis Stevenson. How simple his titles are — and yet how evocative, how iconic:

Kidnapped

Treasure Island

A Child’s Garden of Verses

Other titles benefit from garish incomprehensibility:

The Catcher in the Rye

A Clockwork Orange

Dame Iris’s books are so well-titled, I compulsively begin reading them (and then I don’t finish):

Under the Net

A Severed Head

A Fairly Honourable Defeat
The Flight from the Enchanter
The Unicorn

The Sandcastle

The Sea, the Sea

Nuns and Soldiers

The Nice and the Good

Long, repetitive titles are suitable for short-story collections:

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Chesterton’s best titles, like his sentences, are paradoxical or alliterative (or both):

The Man Who Was Thursday
The Everlasting Man
The Innocence/The Incredulity of Father Brown
Four Faultless Felons

Chandler’s are shot through with tragic romance:

The Big Sleep

The Long Goodbye

The Lady in the Lake (alliterative, grisly — and allusive)

Crime titles tend to be good so long as they aren’t cookie-cutter. The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear are good titles; Holmes’s Adventures, Memoirs, and Return are not. No title is more urgent than this one.

And no publisher seduces better than Harlequin.

The WAG

Saturday night. We’re in our back yard, using our new patio furniture. We’ve bought Bianca a leash and a harness; even so, she refuses to join us outside. …

Aaaannnddd now we’re inside. We missed Bianca too much to stay apart from her. Also, it’s warmer in here.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

You should come to watch your bf play soccer, I tell Edoarda. You probably don’t realize how good he is. Stephen is very, very good.

Absentmindedly she replies: I think somebody told me that.

I’m not that good, says Stephen.

Don’t listen to him, I tell Edoarda. Stephen is truly excellent.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Easter Sunday. Extravagant breakfast at the church; then, pickup soccer from 2:00 to 4:30. Edoarda goes with us. The sole WAG, she watches from the bench, the sun beating down on her. Stephen and I play quite well, but this doesn’t alleviate Edoarda’s misery. Did you see my golazos?, I ask. Uh huh, she murmurs. With my toe I arch a lovely assist to the male Sabby (I’ve gone back to wearing Venus shoes instead of cleats, and, once again, my touch is beautifully precise). I turn toward the bench: Did you see that pass? Uh huh, says Edoarda.

There’s nothing to do but sit, she says.

Well, that’s how it is, watching soccer.

Afterward, driving home, Stephen turns to Edoarda: Did you like how we played? Yes, Edoarda smiles. I did.

A journey to Big Lots

So pleasant was her spring break (the Everglades; Key West), Mary itched to spend more time outside; and so today she dragged me out with her to Big Lots. These patio chairs — one for her, one for Martin — were what she came away with. Not to be outdone, I bought this chair (the blue one) and a giant bag of popcorn.

When we got home, we arranged our chairs next to the hot tub and sat wordlessly. But soon Mary missed Bianca, who never leaves the house. Mary went inside; she returned, the cat clutched to her breast; Bianca, terrified of the hot tub (that great expanse of water) — or perhaps of nature — squirmed out of Mary’s arms and fled indoors.

How, then, would Mary manage? (For how could she enjoy her patio furniture without her precious cat?)

“Bianca!” she coaxed. “Come out here, Bianca!” She held the screen door open. Tentatively, fearfully, the little nose emerged. The beast surveyed the landscape.

“It’s all right, Kitty. Come out, explore the porch.”

The cat extended her paw onto the step. Quickly, she withdrew it.

She sniffed the air, put out her paw again, remained in place.

Fraktur

I thought I’d return to the theme of Nazism. This is from Alexander Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface:

The classifiers of type place all informal gothics under the French heading lettre bâtarde. … A. F. Johnson, the English expert on early types, prefers simply to use the term bastard, although the Latinized bastarda is more generally employed by historians. … 

By 1490 bâtardes were in wide use in Germany, where the name applied to them, apparently arbitrarily, was Schwabacher (there is no evident reason why the Bavarian town Schwabach was thus memorialized, as there was no typefounding or even printing at that location). 

Until the middle of the sixteenth century the Schwabacher style was what was most used for German-language printing; it was saliently used at Basel in Switzerland, then a center of scholarly printing. The next important bâtarde to be developed in Germany was the Fraktur design, which for the following four centuries served as the German national type. 

Fraktur is a more condensed letter than the Schwabacher, and varies from the earlier type in being more pointed, with sharply tapered ascenders; printers naturally had a fondness for this narrower form, which made the type more economical in book work. The design of Fraktur is credited to the Nuremberg calligrapher Johann Neudörferr, and at the request of Emperor Maximilian it was cut in metal for type in 1513. Within the next decade a number of other Frakturs were produced, and by the 1540s it was beginning to replace Schwabacher as the preferred letter for German printing. … 

In the long run it was the classical influence of the Renaissance that spelled the end of the prevalence that the gothic hands had maintained in northern Europe since the twelfth century. Only in Germany did it remain a convention, where it survived as a text type even into the twentieth century. Elsewhere, by the close of the eighteenth century black letter was being used primarily for headings and for specialized liturgical printing. In every other instance the roman letter forms had taken over the world of printing. 

Even in Germany, where Fraktur was the national type, the black letter has had a curious history. During the middle years of the nineteenth century, a great period of European nationalism, the use of Fraktur was inevitably strengthened — sufficiently, in fact, to offset the modernizing influence of the Industrial Revolution, particularly through the dominance of German technical and scientific literature. With the growth of international advertising in the early years of the present century, the use of roman type in Germany increased, but even as late as 1930 almost sixty percent of the new books being published were still composed in the German black letter (also called Deutsche Schriften), and almost every newspaper stayed with the Fraktur. 

When Adolf Hitler came to power, his National Socialist Party decreed that the Fraktur be considered the only appropriate form for the German language. This resulted in a wider use of Fraktur in the twentieth century than in earlier times. In 1940, however, it was officially determined that Fraktur interfered with the German plan of world domination, since outside Germany the roman forms prevailed. Thus, the Nazis then issued a proclamation that roman would henceforth be the German standard type, the explanation given being that Fraktur was a ‘Schwabacher-Jewish type.’ 

In postwar Germany roman has become the standard type, although with some difficulty, as the schoolbooks through which all adults had learned their alphabet were composed in black letter. But there is little likelihood that Fraktur will ever again be the national type; now less than one percent of German books appear in that hand. As a display letter, however, the face has been revived.

Anglophilia

By now you should be tired of reading, every fall and spring, how the misty weather makes me anglophilic — how, suddenly, I want to think about punting on rivers, eating suet, having séances in gloomy houses. (I want to think about these things, not do them.) … Dystopias even seem agreeable. Right now I’m reading The Children of Men and envying the protagonists. Yes: hoodlums roam the countryside; but it’s jolly to be reminded of A Clockwork Orange. Yes: the government is ruthless; and so conspirators must plot in beautiful old churches, or in gardens, or museums. … What the survivalists hoard is wine. Where they live is Oxford. … Had C.S. Lewis remained in Ulster, would we have liked him just as well? Would we have been as interested in his life and writings? … What accounts for the forcefulness of anglophilia? … Even the Nazis, deep down, harbored affection for the English. Which was why they lost.