Book titles that should not be

[gmw]

So while I was browsing I came across this:
Frank Herbert: Unpublished Stories
and got a chuckle.

Alright, so I'm easily amused. Are Wordfire Press the only ones who need to employ an editor for their titles?

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by gmw

So while I was browsing I came across this:
Frank Herbert: Unpublished Stories
and got a chuckle.

Alright, so I'm easily amused. Are Wordfire Press the only ones who need to employ an editor for their titles?

Your example made me think of the endless listicles online of "untranslatable words", most of which proclaim with breathless excitement how the words chosen defy translation, then proceed to translate them. It's not unlikely that books exist with titles like "You can't say "X" in English"

[ekbell]

It's not exactly a book title that should never be but high school during the late 80's was not the place to be carrying around a book entitled Sex and Temperament.

[gmw]

The Sea is My Brother: The Lost Novel by Jack Kerouac


You'd think I had better things to do.

[issybird]

Two titles that always struck me as particularly unfelicitous are Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. They sound like a couple of morality tracts and not at all like comedy of manners novels.

[issybird]

On the other hand, sometimes the author was saved from himself. When you consider that Fitzgerald considered naming The Great Gatsby, Trimalchio in West Egg! Sounds like a stinker if there ever was one, and not one of the great American novels.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by issybird

Two titles that always struck me as particularly unfelicitous are Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. They sound like a couple of morality tracts and not at all like comedy of manners novels.

I had not looked at them like that before, but you're right.

Originally Posted by issybird

On the other hand, sometimes the author was saved from himself. When you consider that Fitzgerald considered naming The Great Gatsby, Trimalchio in West Egg! Sounds like a stinker if there ever was one, and not one of the great American novels.

Hah! Not a case of "A rose by any other name"? Makes me wonder what might have happened.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by issybird

Two titles that always struck me as particularly unfelicitous are Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. They sound like a couple of morality tracts and not at all like comedy of manners novels.

That may well have been a useful camouflage, given the moral panic about novel reading at the time.