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.)
(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 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
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.