Yellow, mellow, smellow

The use of the colon in titling, and other laments

The title as we know it is a relatively recent invention. It took shape only as the title as such was distinguished from the rest of a book’s bibliographical baggage. In the eighteenth century, titles were thought of as the appropriate forum to impart the information that today is divided among the title proper, the table of contents, index, blurb, author’s biography, and copyright data. We have all seen examples of this style that begin with The Such and Such, shift gears with a being the this and that… and continue at essay length. The Guinness Book records the extremes. The current winner is Srinivasan N. C. Lakshmi with a recent work on stock price predictions, graced by a 4500-word title. The master of the genre, though, must be Daniel Defoe, whose titles are, in effect, entire plots – or spoilers, in the current parlance. The full title of Moll Flanders (1722), for example, is The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother) Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent. Today we prefer the short, sweet and snappy.

Like many other dilettantes, I have a goodly number of titles to my credit – titles, mind you, not books. I am continually surprising myself with a cleverly dismembered quotation, a delicate pun, a subtle alliteration that would form the perfect title for a book on a particular subject. Nor am I alone. Werner Bergengruen, in his charmingly compendious disputation on the varieties of the species, Titulus (1960), mentions that the writer Willy Seidel once had a favorite title for which he hoped to produce a book: Die Stunde der Vollbärte (The Hour of the Beards). Anne Tyler had a title, Celestial Navigations, that was first used to designate her cat and only later a manuscript (as Robert Moss revealed in the pages of the New York Times some years ago). A maxim attributed to Pascal has it that « The last act of writing a work is knowing what to put first », but I and those like me, knowingly and wantonly, disregard it. And then interest flags, memory sags and these scintillating masterpieces never get to the first page.

Written first, then titled. That’s what I have always assumed that the really great books were — the fruits of intellectual stamina, personal courage, vast erudition, heroic scale, and hefty Sitzfleisch. For a great book, after all, the title is really an insignificance, merely the handle by which we extract it from the ranks of mediocrity. Only the novice reads The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant; the cognoscenti tackle the « First Critique ». Had Kant written no other book, we would ask simply for « Kant », much as we do for Proust or Dante. In the case of other Great Works, even where one person has written several, the author counts for most.

A case in point: most of Wittgenstein’s books were published posthumously, and his editor was presumably too modest to impose her own titles at all. The Blue and Brown Books: named, cautiously, after the colors of his notebooks. Zettel is dicier, especially in translation: what English-language publisher would want to publish (and what distinguished philosopher would want to refer to) a book entitled « Scraps » or « Pieces of Paper »? Wittgenstein’s Zettel may in fact just have been scraps, but the German Zettel, even in its silliness, sounds so much more profound.

What of great books that have no easily identifiable authors? Mercifully, these are few. The Bible (titling at its best and easiest) comes from the Greek word for « book ». This can only be done once, unfortunately. (Had the Hollywood moguls who turned Book into celluloid realized the simple principle behind its title — let us call it an absolute title — they could have saved themselves some exertion: The Greatest Story Ever Told could have been more succinctly entitled Story. A sequel logic, though, would require Testament I and Testament II. That too has its pitfalls. Alan Bennett’s play, The Madness of George III, was re-titled The Madness of King George when filmed, lest American audiences fret that they had missed the first two installments of the franchise. Consecutive titling does not work at this level of absolute titles. In P.G. Wodehouse’s My Man Jeeves (1919), Alexander Worple « had written a book called American Birds, and was writing another, to be called More American Birds. When he had finished that, the presumption was that he would begin a third, and keep on till the supply of American birds gave out. ») Because of Book’s monopoly position in the world of titles, subsequent attempts at monolithic stature have been edged into the realm of qualifiers. Mao’s Little Red Book (an unofficial title), while almost a rival blockbuster to Book, already trails two adjectives. By the time we get to Dr. Spock’s Baby Book (also an unofficial title, for The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care), we have a name in tow as well. Less confident admirers of Book, meanwhile, call Book Good Book, a sad admission that the competition is stiffening.

At one end of the titling spectrum lie the most significant books, for which the title is unimportant — merely a handle. At the other end lie those books that, while insignificant in themselves, clamor for attention because of what they are about, or of the connections their authors cultivated. Their titles are an unabashed act of advertising: Ten Years as Hitler’s Man Servant, Hitler Was My Friend, Hitler and I, I Knew Hitler, I Paid Hitler, and so on, or more simply and intriguingly: I Knew These Dictators. And this is just a smattering of the autocrat lifestyle genre, which includes such gems as Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World’s Most Colorful Despots and Dictators’ Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants. Because the interest attaches less to the work than to its subject, the titles are just markers used to flag the reader down. Monotony is the counterintuitive result.

There are only so many ways one can twist a doorknob. Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, recollections, and reminiscences abound with unimaginative titles: Unended Quest; Impressions and Opinions; Things Learned by Living; Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions; Forty Fruitful Years; Thrilling Experiences; Stirring Incidents; This is My Life; What I Remember; Rumors and Reflections; Mosaic of Memories; Random Notes and Reflections; Rambling Recollections; Rambles, Roamings, and Recollections. Some manage to be more intriguing: From the Breadline to the Pulpit; It’s the Gypsy in Me; 500,000 Miles Without a Dollar; Memoirs of a Superfluous Man; Merchant of Alphabets; Indiscretions; And All For What?; Things I Shouldn’t Tell, or, somewhat more elaborately, Walls and Bars: Life of Claude A. Gundeu, Saved by the Blood From a Drunkard’s Hell, Now in Taylor University, Upland, Indiana, Preparing for Temperance Work.

Most titles hover between these extremes. They are attached to works without singular significance that nevertheless stake a claim to an existence independent of the status, reputation, or acquaintances of their maker. They must be more than just a handle and more than just an indication of pedigree. Their titles are, or should be, a part of the work itself, something that captures the essence of the book. But there the riddles begin.

The best titles are not incomprehensible in and of themselves, yet cannot be fully appreciated except in conjunction with the book they mark. This, by the way, is why the titles of works that exist only within books are curiously unconvincing: Huxtable’s Sidelights on Horace (Doyle), A Game of Shifting Mirrors (Borges), Memoirs of a Forgetful Man (Nabokov), Pipe-Lines to the Infinite (Huxley), The Man with the Shredded Ear (Chandler), Being, Inc. (Lem), The Mad Trist (Poe), The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (Dick).¹ That holds doubly for the titles of the merely ornamental books that were produced to grace the libraries of Victorian literati. Dickens’s faux library housed works such as Kant’s Ancient Humbugs, Heavyside’s Conversations with Nobody and Five Minutes in China (3 vols).²

A postulate: a title should be able to stand by itself but blossom only in unison with the work. It should embody the book while also being comprehensible only in relation to it. One consequence of this postulate is that certain kinds of titles, however popular, by definition cannot be among the best. Titles of novels that are simply the names of the protagonist, for example, remain cyphers so long as one does not know the book in question. Good-seeming name titles, that is to say, are only post-facto successes to the extent the book is. Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, Emma, Hamlet, Oliver Twist, Anna Karenina, Lolita, Herzog, and so on, are nothing as titles and everything as books. Consider, in melancholy contrast, the telephone directory of names-as-titles that we have either never heard of or forgotten in the meantime: Kate, Alanna, Arabella, Mildred, Daphne, John and Irene, Griffith Gaunt, not to mention Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Today, global humanity publishes over two million books annually (not including self-published works). Over 400.000 of these are scholarly monographs. Many are the tactics that authors and their publicists enlist, however vain the quest for eyeballs. As with all things human, fashions and trends blow through with regularity.

Consider the pompous maximizers, a category in which French philosophers take the lead. What book has been more ambitiously titled than Sartre’s Being and Nothingness? Some competition might have come from Foucault’s The Order of Things, but that is only the English title, turbo-charged for the translation. The original French comes out as « Words and Things ». Dommage for Foucault, there already existed a French book called L’ordre des choses and an English book called Words and Objects. Since neither title conveyed much about what Foucault actually wrote, it did not matter. Translators took their revenge with Vincent Descombes’s Le meme et l’autre (1979), calling it Modern French Philosophy: Anglo-Saxon commonsense imposed on Gallic grandiosity.

But not all titles lose in translation. Some of the most distinguished were invented for their appearance abroad. In English, Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur became the lovelier Civilization and Its Discontents — so good that anything can now have its own « discontents »: modernity, leisure, nostalgia, late style, narrative, aesthetics, capitalism, you name it. Freud’s own suggestion (mercifully ignored) was a literal translation from the German: Man’s Discomfort in Civilization, which sounds like a book about starched collars and corset stays.

Then there are the stuck-in-a-rut schools of titling. Philosophy’s ruts are especially mucky. It was impossible, during the last decades of previous millennium, to write a book of philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon examine-your-intuitions-and-analyze-everyday-language school and not title it with three words picked from the following list: Language, Truth, Logic, Meaning, Reference, Necessity, Mind, Reality, Self, Will, Freedom. In the closely-related triptych school, three big concepts doth a title make: Language, Truth, and Logic; Language, Truth, and Politics; History, Man, and Reason; Mind, Language, and Reality; Mathematics, Matter, and Method; Mind, Language, and Reality; Language, Metaphysics, and Death; Body, Mind, and Death; Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism; Action, Emotion, and the Will; Will, Freedom, and Power; Mind, Self, and Society; Symbol, Myth, and Culture; Thought, Action, and Passion; Self, Knowledge, and Freedom; Necessity, Cause and Blame; Time, Creation, and the Continuum; and Matter, Space, and Motion. The list is long, but not endless.³

Then there is the my-book-report approach: A Theory of Justice (Rawls), A Study of History (Toynbee), Love Story (Segal). These announce their genre without saying anything about the particular approach taken or the conclusions arrived at. They modestly mark the writers’ immodest ambition to be more important than their titles. Kant’s Critique was like this and has stood the test of time. Rawls too has achieved this status. (He always referred to his book as TJ.) Toynbee’s grasp clearly exceeded his reach. Segal’s royalties were doubtless the envy of his colleagues in the Yale Classics Department, but his foray into light literature deep-sixed his hopes of tenure.

More abuses. Look up « Saga » in a library catalogue and gird for language’s inevitable degradation: The Saga of the Jews of North Africa, of Special Effects, of Sherbrooke Street Yesterday and Today, of Texas, of Air Mail, of the Buffalo, of American Jewry, of Auntie Stone and her Cabin, of Lake Tahoe, of Moses, of San Juan, and so on. Njáll would have wept in Bergþórshvoll. Closely related is the fill-in-the-blank school: On ___, The Politics of ___, The ___ Affair, ___ Revisited, Dialectics of ___, From ___ to ___, and finally (dated, but worth reviving), A Prolegomenon to ___.

What of present participles and gerunds? Classics have shown the way: Taming of the Shrew, Waiting for Godot, or Being There. But immoderation has prevailed. We have had Fear of Flying, Running with Scissors, Leaving Las Vegas, Leaving a Doll’s House, Becoming, Telling the Truth about History, Speaking with the Angel, Consuming Culture, Walking in the Shade, Going Clear and Listening to Prozac.

Quotation-titles: another trend. Some of the best titles ever are quotations, or allusions, but so subtle that readers may not even recognize them as such: Absalom, Absalom, All the King’s Men, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, As I Lay Dying, Darkness Visible, A Farewell to Arms, Magic Mountain, No Country for Old Men. Who could quibble? More troublesome, though, are the titles that bristle with performative quotation marks, but the quotes are sentimental at best, incomprehensible at worst: « A Hideous Bit of Morbidity »: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I; « I, Too, Am America »: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life; « Dream the Rest »: On the Mystery and Vernacular Modernism of Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Cubamerican « Cigarmaker, Creator, Healer, & Man »; « There are Other Ways to Get Happy »: African-American Urban Folklore; « How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses? »: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs.

Alliteration, exclamation, and exhortation. These too-easy advertising virtues have corrupted even the most arcane scholarship. But they don’t really work: since the short and snappy tag often conveys little about the book, and since a general peppiness reigns, we’ve come to depend on that bane of modern publishing: the compound title, joined by the ubiquitous colon.

The first part is supposed to arrest the skimmer’s attention. Having been hooked, the second tells them where they have landed. The main title may be an attention-grabbing exclamation, an alliterative string, with some connection to the subject at hand (Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England); or a curious phrase or quotation that remains wholly obscure until the book has been read (The Pink Yo-Yo: Social Mobility in Belgrade; The Blue Guitar: Representation and Community), or a generality with only a vague connection to the subtitle (By the Banks of the Thames: Russians in Eighteenth-Century Britain), or a pun (The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade), or an allusion (Sound and Fury Signifying Something: Attempts to Control Comic Book Publishers). The title of the essay you are reading is of this last allusive variety: « mellow yellow smellow » is Leopold Bloom’s description in Ulysses of Molly’s posterior and, by slight extension (in the fevered brain of this essay’s title-seeker), of her colon and therefore an excuse to bring literature and sex into a discussion that would otherwise be more staid. Sometimes this works.

Plenty of title-colon-subtitle concoctions, to be sure, lighten up otherwise drearier and more mundane titles. Gay and Gray: The Older Homosexual Man; Party Politics: The Confessions of a Washington Party-Goer; Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893-1914; Slave of the Lamp: A Public Servant’s Notebook; Spending to Save: The Complete Story of Relief; Mothers in the Fatherland: Women in Nazi Germany; Doghouse, Jailhouse, Madhouse: A Study of Oskar Panizza’s Life and Literature; Horse Power: The Politics of the Turf; Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes; Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery; Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of New Deal Labor Policy; Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator; or reversed: Imperialist Japan: The Yen to Dominate.⁴

But soon the ranks of drones and epigones darken the horizon like locusts swarming the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the colon-template grows tiresome. Maybe all writers, editors and publishers should title every book Sex and Violence, followed by the more appropriate subtitle. After a season or two, no one would notice Sex and Violence any longer, and we could all go back to uncompounded, un-coloned titles. In the absence of such an industry-wide agreement, we are doomed to suffer through the endless rows of books adorned with the tarnished bravura of peppy titles intended to circle their mundane topics with a halo of irresistibility.

Especially saddening are the X and Y titles — like, say, Crisis and Compromise — that can apply to every history ever written. I offer here a matching columns quiz and challenge anyone to pair up these main and subtitles:

MATCH THE MAIN TITLE TO THE SUBTITLE

The main titles, so airy as to mean precisely nothing, strive for an effect they cannot possibly sustain. These perfectly good books on well-conceived specific topics are reduced to non-subjects of the most generalized vacuity.⁵

A more recent variant is to be found in those aspirationally punchy, one-word titles where, again, enlightenment arrives only with the subtitle. Since the main title conveys little about the book, usually several works share it:

Take your pick!

Are we doomed to an ever more shrill and tinny grasping for effect, an ever-starker contrast between the expectorations of the main title and the bovine mundanity of the actual topic, sequestered behind the colon that separates ambition from dissertation, marketing from editorial, sound from substance?

Not if we do two things: first, ban the colon from titles for a decade. This would force authors to formulate their intentions succinctly and convey the point of their book lapidarily, sparing us the groaning excesses of the peppy: pedantic mode.

Second, we should examine the Great Titles of Western Culture for examples to emulate. Since 1978, we’ve had a prize for the strangest book titles.⁶ Why not for the best? I offer here, for edification, a short list and issue an invitation to help compile a repertoire of admirable examples:

• Too-Clever-By-Half-Category: At Random (Cerf), A Knight at the Opera (Bing)
• Get-To-The-Point-Category: Whose Blake Did Joyce Know and What Difference Does It Make?
• You-Don’t-Have-To-Read-the-Book-To-Get-the-Point-Category: Military Justice is to Justice What Military Music is to Music
• Marriage-of-Form-and-Function-Category: Steal This Book (Hoffman)
• Form-As-Content-Category: Hopscotch (Cortazar)
• Perfectly-Titled-Fiction-Category: The Man Who Was Thursday; Much Ado About Nothing; The Importance of Being Ernest; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; 1984; Les Fleurs du Mal; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Finally, for what our cultural industries like to call a « Lifetime Achievement Award », I nominate that most consistently brilliant titler, Søren Kierkegaard. His titles arrest the attention, linger in the memory, and epitomize the work they adorn: Sickness Unto Death, The Diary of a Seducer, Fear and Trembling, and, the best of them all, perhaps the only (ignoring for the moment David Copperfield) book after which a person (the draft resister Enten Eller) has been named, Either/Or.

1. More examples in Ed Park, « Titles within a Tale », New York Times (23 July 2009), and « Fake Books from Fiction That We Wish We Could Read », Flavorwire (20 October 2011). Notable exceptions are the fake titles in the film Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry), which are better than, for example, the equivalents from the Royal Tenenbaums. (David Haglund, « The Brilliant Fake Novels of Listen Up Philip », Slate (21 October 2014); Stephen Coles, « Book Covers from the Royal Tenenbaums », Fonts in Use (18 August 2012). ↩︎
2. Alex Johnson, « The Book List: The Fake Titles Charles Dickens Used to Decorate his Library », Independent, 14 August 2018. ↩︎
3. A similar tick, the « blank of blank and blank » approach, has afflicted young adult fiction: A Court of Thorn and Roses, or Smoke and Bone, or Wings and Ruin, or Mist and Fury, or Frost and Starlight, and so forth. At last glance on Good Reads, the list had 518 titles. ↩︎
4. Some title-colon-subtitle compounds absolutely fail to enlighten, almost heroically: « Virtual Text/Virtual Reader: The Structural Signature Within, Behind, Beyond, Above » (an article about Joyce). ↩︎
5. In fact the quiz was a trick: the list here is arranged as the works were issued, but nothing prevents us from scrambling them and yet achieving precisely the same effect. ↩︎
6. In 2024, The Bookseller/Diagram Prize went to The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire. ↩︎