Just wanted to say Thanks to both of you.
For my purposes a combination of the two responses handled what I wanted to do. I reset
Preferences>Tweaks>Control sorting of Title and Series to
library_order (the default).
Then I created a custom column based off of other columns and set the template to
{title_sort}.
Now my book titles are showing up as "Fly, The" - just as I wanted them. And, since the title and title_sort info are not being altered, no red background. (So I can do a search later on for incorrect data without getting lots of false responses.)
Finally, I hid the original
title column (right click column heading in book list) and everything is set as wanted for the book title... now to tackle the next portion!
BTW, sorry for asking about the sort order when it's clearly stated in the Tweak, but honestly, after trying several different ways to get things set-up the way I wanted them... and failing, I couldn't see the forest for the trees as it were. Not even the digital trees.