I posted yesterday on the book, Helping. I could not avoid noticing that in addition to having a subtitle it has a sub, subtitle. The whole thing reads like this:
Helping, How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help; Understanding Effective Dynamics in One-to-One, Group, and Organizational Relationships
It gave me pause to think about the history of subtitles. Wikipedia’s article on the subject includes this statement:
Subtitles for plays were fashionable in the Elizabethan era; William Shakespeare parodied this vogue by giving Twelfth Night the pointless subtitle What You Will, implying that the subtitle can be whatever the audience wants it to be.
My library contains many fine books with titles ranging from one to four words that have succeeded happily with nary a trace of a subtitle. Some of my favorites are Leadership (James McGregor Burns), Truman (David McCullough), On Leadership (John W. Gardner), The Marketing Imagination (Theodore Levitt), and Managing for Results (Peter F. Drucker). Perhaps the clarity and familiarity of the topics render subtitles unnecessary for these authors. Or, it might be a testament to their self-confidence.
The need for subtitles could be a function of the need to explain the oddness of a topic. These books have subtitles, perhaps for just that reason: Bad Girls, 26 Writers Misbehave (Ellen Sussman); Bonk, The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, (Mary Roach); Lust In Translation, The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee, (Pamela Druckerman). I recommend these books, by the way, if you are interested in getting inside other people’s heads on these subjects. The writing in Bad Girls is particularly excellent, as one would hope of a group of professional writers. I have written short reports on these and many other books on my Goodreads site.
Some classics already have subtitles. Mr. Melville, possibly as an act of caution, added “or The Whale” to his magnificent Moby Dick. The use of ‘or’ also figured prominently in the old cartoon show, Rocky & Bullwinkle and seems terribly charming to me.
Could we possibly “improve” on some of the classics by adding subtitles? What cute phrase never occurred to Nathaniel Hawthorne as he wrote The Scarlet Letter that might engage the eye in the literature aisle of Barnes & Noble and appeal to the reader who might otherwise pass by?
Anyone who has some ideas for embellishing classic book titles with subtitles, and possibly even sub subtitles, is hereby invited to pass them along to me through this blog. If submissions are abundant I will offer a prize appropriate to the crime of messing with literary classics. A gift certificate for chicken nuggets seems about right to me, given the nature of the offense.
Keep those cards and letters coming!
