AUTHORS HUNT FOR TITLES
I. V. Chalapti Rao
Title is to a book what icing is to a cake and portico is to a building. It has flavour and glamour. It is an appetiser too. It may sound paradoxical but it is more difficult for an author to find a suitable title for a book or an article than to write it. The choice of title gives greater trouble than the actual writing of the book. Very few authors start with a title, which is fixed in advance. It is the general practice to write the thing first and then search for an appropriate title of the book or caption of an article.
Is it possible to identify the characteristics of a good title? The answer is in the affirmative. It can be done by making a careful study of the titles of popular authors who achieved success. A title should be easily pronounced and memorable. It should appear to be attractive to the potential reader and make him think. It should appeal to the imagination of the beholder of the book when he sees it on the book seller’s stands or on the shelf of a library. Most readers judge a book on first sight of the title. Its lettering and designing can be aesthetically satisfying. However, this last one is not an essential qualification but a desirable one. The perfect title should indicate what the book is about. The placard should tally with the performance! It should not be blatantly fanciful, extremely suggestive and essentially irrelevant. It should not be long. In this jet age people are time constrained.
Research can be done in this field. If an investigator takes a random sampling of 500 to 1000 titles, he will come across a good number of interesting ones and many indifferent ones. A useful thesis can be prepared on correspondence or mismatch between the book (or article) and its contents. This is a fertile and promising field for university men who cast around for suitable themes for their dissertations for Ph.D’s and M.Phil’s. At present they choose stereotypes and beaten tracks. No path-breaking research.
Often we find that good titles are not ready-made or easily available to the authors in gift packs. They are not at their beck and call to be summoned at will. They are hit upon only after a lot of striving, searching and sweating. Before they arrive at the right title the authors make several false starts. Yet the good titles score over others. It is interesting to know that well-known and popular books originally had awkward and unattractive titles. ‘Alice’s Adventure in the Under Ground’ was the original title of the famous book ‘Alice’s in the Wonder Land’. The first title was pale and ineffective. The revised title raises expectations sky-high. Robert Louis Steveson’s master-piece ‘Treasure Island’ originally bore a drab and lack-lustre title – ‘The Sea Cook’ (Long John Silver dominates the story. It was filmed). W.M. Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ was a revised title. The original title contemplated by the author was ‘Pencil Sketches of English Society’. What an unglamorous title for such a fascinating book, a masterpiece.
Generally Dickens, R.L. Stevenson, Jane Austen and Hardy gave excellent titles to their immortal novels. For his ‘Pickwick Papers’, however, Dicken’s original title was ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’. The former is crisp and concise. The latter is insipid and inelegant. Original titles must have been changed by the authors in their inspired moments or in response to the advice of their close friends. The oft-mentioned Shakespearean quotation “What is there in a name? A rose will smell as sweet by any other name” does not apply to book titles. There is a lot more in the name of a book than the authors know of.
Great authors are endowed with the gift of inventing perfect titles for their literary works. Shakespeare was one of them. For example, his titles ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ‘A Winter’s Tale’, ‘The Tempest’, ‘As You Like It’ are eye-catching and ‘Literatesque’ (to use Bagehot’s phrase). Charles Dickens was another writer who gave meaningful and memorable titles to his novels. ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, ‘Great Expectations’, ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, ‘Bleak House’ etc. Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Mansfield Park’ are crisp and concise.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the authors were in the habit of giving either long, pompous and pedantic titles or alternative and supplementary ones, e.g.…‘Eric or Little by Little’, ‘Julian Snodwick, or the Amazing but True Adventures of a young Man of Character who Ran away at a Tender Age to join Her Majesty’s Navy, presented for the Moral uplift of the lower orders’. The title is as long as the proverbial tail of Hanuman! The substance of the whole book and its purpose are packed in the title itself! William Cobbet wrote a good book, which gives practical advice to young people. Strangely, the title of the book is ‘Advice to young women in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life’. In fact the book is useful to all people who wish to improve themselves socially and ethically. Such long titles repel the potential readers. One of the characteristics of a successful title, therefore, is its shortness or brevity.
Some authors, particularly modern authors prefer quizzical, suggestive and symbolic titles – ‘The God of Small Things’, ‘Moon and Six Pence’; ‘The Razor’s Edge’; ‘Cat and Shakespeare’; ‘Serpent and the Rope’; ‘First Among Equals’; ‘The Wheels’; ‘As the Crow Flies’; ‘A Quiver Full of Arrows’; ‘Doll’s House’; ‘The Apple Cart’, ‘Methuselah’, ‘The Thousand Faces of Night’, ‘The Original Sin’. Does the reader know their authors?
The author’s travails do not end after choosing the title. His mind will be afflicted with all kinds of doubts. Will this title click with the potential readers? Is it original in the sense that it was not already used by some other authors? Of course, the author is not expected to read all the books that were published before. In spite of the genuine need there is no Official Register for author’s book titles making it mandatory for authors to obtain prior permission from a central agency. Such a register seems to be necessary not exactly for copyright purpose but for avoiding duplication. For the titles of News Papers and Journals, it is necessary to apply for permission to the Commissioner of Police who will try to avoid duplication or repetition before according approval. For book titles there is no perspective or restrictive procedure. Consequently there is a chance of several books being brought into the market with the same title. For example, a few books were published with the title ‘Love among the Ruins’ which was the title of one of the poems of Robert Browning. Books with the same title were written by several authors – Warwick Deeping, Victor Kutchin, Elmer Davis, Angela Thirkell and Evelin Waugh. Of course Evelin Waugh’s book ‘Love Among the Ruins’ became very popular.
Imitation of the titles of the successful books is a common practice particularly in the case of books in Indian languages. If they are not totally copied, atleast marginal changes are effected. Such imitations are indeed tributes to the authors of the original books. In this context, our contributors are requested to give suitable titles to their articles! Some of them are mundane and matter of fact.
There was a time when books were used as furniture by aristocrats and famous authors. Drawing rooms were decorated with neat lines of handsome dummy books. In those days of scarcity of real books dummy books were arranged in rows on the shelves. Selection of interesting titles to those dummy volumes gave them scope for exercising their wit and humour. The Sixth Duke of Devonshire consulted the English poet Tom hood and fixed the following titles to his dummy books: ‘Byron’s Sermons’, ‘Johnson’s Contra Dictionary’, ‘Don Quixote’s Library’, ‘Superficial Knowledge’, ‘Empty Covers’, ‘Save on Civilisation’.
Aldous Huxley in his book ‘Crome Yellow’ describes a typical dummy library with funny and fanciful titles. ‘Than’s works and Wanderings’, ‘Wild Goose Chase-, a Novel in 6 Volumes’, ‘Biography of Men on whom Greatness was Thrust’, ‘Biography of Men who were Never Great’. They are indeed intriguing and mind-boggling titles!
Charles Dickens the prolific writer, also maintained a queer collection of book titles for his own dummy books. It is very difficult to distinguish real books from dummy books! His biographer John Foster might have assisted him in inventing eye-catching and mind-boggling titles: ‘Cats’ Lives in Nine Volumes’, ‘Mr. J. Horner on Poets’ Corner’, ‘Five Minutes in China’, ‘Noah’s Architecture’, ‘40 Winks At the Pyramids’, ‘Guide to Refreshing Sleep in 31 Volumes’. The last-named book title is indeed a masterpiece! Thirty-one Volumes will indeed produce refreshing sleep, even for those who are accustomed to cat nap, or suffer from insomnia!