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How 10 classics got their titles

I have just stumbled across a fantastic blog that has totally and inexplicably passed me by till now. It’s called How Books Got Their Titles and it does exactly what it says on the tin (or should that be spine?)

In it, Gary Dexter, who writes the Title Deed column in the Sunday Telegraph, delves into the stories behind the titles of classic books - often as weird and wonderful as the narratives themselves. Here are ten of his most brilliant insights:

Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again

Thomas Wolfe’s first novel Look Homeward, Angel cast a critical eye on the small town of his birth, where it was subsequently greeted with outrage.

Wolfe later recounted the experience over dinner to a friend, the Communist activist Ella Winter, who exclaimed, ‘But don’t you know you can’t go home again?’

Wolfe replied: ‘Can I have that? I mean for a title...I’m writing a piece...and I’d like to call it that. It says exactly what I mean.’

E.M Forster’s A Passage to India

Takes its title from the poem of the same name by Walt Whitman:

Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d
(The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,)
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As, fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

PG Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens

Wodehouse had a life-long friend called William Townend who, one day, told him about another acquiantance...

"A prep-school master" writes Dexter, "blessed with the unlikely and rather Wodehousian name of Carrington Craxton, [who] had embarked on a disastrous chicken-farming venture in Devonshire"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in a Time of Cholera

Got its title through an opportunity for pun that does not exist in English.

Cólera, in Spanish, means both ‘cholera’ and ‘anger’.

William Shakespeare’s Othello

Shakespear's Moor has a possible precursor in French medieval romance: Sir Othuel, a Moorish companion of Roland, of noble birth, who had converted to Christianity.

"Shakespeare could easily", Dexter writes, "have Italianized Othuel by adding a final ‘o’, thus giving the name a Venetian ring."

Winston Churchill's While England Slept

In 1938, Churchill's American publishers, Putnam’s, cabled him to ask for an alternative title for a volume of his collected speeches.

The cable operator garbled Churchill's suggestion, The Years of the Locust, so that it arrived with Putnams as The Years of the Lotus.

"Putnam’s were puzzled", writes Dexter. "They knew that the lotus was a plant famous for its soporific properties, and, in an attempt to give a sense of this, settled on While England Slept."

Joseph Heller's Something Happened

Heller himself explained:

"Something Happened turned up in the fall of ’63 when I was walking with George Mandel past Korvettes or Brentano’s [in Manhattan] and a kid came running past and yelled over his shoulder to another, “Hey, come on, something’s happened” — some sort of traffic accident I guess it must have been."

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace

Six years before the novel's publicated, Tolstoy had visited the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in exile.

Proudhon showed him a copy of his own book, just finished, on international armed conflict. What was it called? War and Peace.

"Tolstoy", writes Dexter, "seems to have decided to appropriate his title as an act of deliberate homage."

W Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence

Owes the brilliance of its name to The Times! After the publication of his previous novel, Of Human Bondage, a Times reviewer wrote of its main character:
 
“Like so many young men he was so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet.”

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf:

Hitler's first choice for his autobiography was A Four and a Half Years’ Battle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice: A Reckoning with the Destroyers of the Nazi Party Movement.

For  reasons unknown, his publisher, Max Amann, decided that a snappier title might be better advised

... Got any others?

A book to read - The Best and the Brightest

Preparing my column - on Robert McNamara - for this morning's paper, involved reacquanting myself with one of the - in fact perhaps the - greatest political books I have ever read.

David Halberstam's The Best and The Brightest is a profile of two things. First, the team of brilliant young men who came to Washington with JFK. And second, the decisions that led to the Vietnam War.

With a wonderful prose style to assist him, Halberstam sketches the Kennedy men in turn, finding the right place in the narrative to place each profile. He helps you to understand relationships and characters and is careful not to be anachronistic - he makes sure that his profiles develop as the story does.

But the profile of the Vietnam decision is even better.

Halbertsam shows how early political decisions are made, often without the protagonists even realising that they they have made a decision at all.

This is an ideal book for those who like a meaty work of non fiction to take on holiday. 

When Osama went to Los Angeles

Four years ago, while researching a book, the American journalist Steve Coll was introduced to a man who had been a friend and neighbour of the teenage Osama Bin Laden.

The meeting sparked a long and frustrating hunt in which Coll chased stories and gathered fragments of evidence to support his budding thesis: that the young bin Laden had once made a trip to the United States.

It looks like he’s finally got his proof. On his blog over at The New Yorker, Coll reproduces an excerpt from the forthcoming book Growing Up Bin Laden, by bin Laden's first wife Najwa bin Laden and his son, Omar bin Laden, soon to be published by St. Martin’s Press.

Najwa describes towing two babies across the world to Indiana, following her husband's whim, only to while away her time in Indiana as her husband makes shadowy business trips.

But it’s the smallest details that are most fascinating. Trips to a shopping mall in Indiapolis, the gawping men at airports… and most of all the thought of Osama on the streets of Los Angeles.

Voodoo Histories: a round-up of reviews

David Aaronovitch, my colleague here at the Times, has written a new book, the title of which speaks for itself: "Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History". Here's what others are saying about it...

Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times: A “forensically intelligent and hugely enjoyable study of modern conspiracy theories

Giles Foden in The Guardian: “One gets a strong sense from this book that it is Aaronovitch's intellectual curiosity about the early phases of that tragic (but also, in his capable hands, sometimes comic) ascription of control that has driven the whole project.”

David Leask in The Scotsman: “Time and again, Aaronovitch remarks with growing frustration, conspiricists claim they are sceptics, challenging the accepted version of events, while never allowing the same level of scrutiny to be applied to their alternatives.”

Johann Hari in The Independent:“In his gloriously readable new book, Aaronovitch traces how these "voodoo histories" began – and where they could be leading us.”

How to ensure your book is a bestseller

First, orchestrate a rare meeting between President Obama and President Chavez. Lay on the backslapping and good cheer to attract instant media attention.

Then assure your book gets handed over as a gift at the key photo moment.

The result? Your book leaps from number 54,295 to number 2 on Amazon overnight.

Author Eduardo Galeano must be having a very good day.

Are you about to be sent a free Kindle?

Stephen Johnson has obtained his first Kindle and posts on his first impressions.

He isn't so keen on the grey-on-grey screen format, but I think that is one of the device's most important selling points.

His most interesting observation is this one:

I bought a Times subscription -- even though I already pay for the print edition -- because the convenience of having the Times permanently loaded on my Kindle seemed well worth an extra fifteen bucks.

Haven't started paying for blogs yet, but I can imagine with one-click simplicity that I'll do that as well. If micropayments for content ever takes off -- the whole iTunes for News model -- I suspect it'll come in through the back door of the Kindle.

I agree.

I can't use the Kindle as it should be used - to download wirelessly and without a PC - because the wireless function doesn't work in the UK yet. But I can see that when this facility is available it would be a fabulously convenient way to read newspapers and magazines.

It will face mainstream publications with a big decision. Should they sell their offerings to Kindle/electronic books or give it away free?

The danger of selling is obvious - it could be undercut by free material. But in the long run it is hard to see free as being economically sustainable.

One possibility might be to give away the Kindle and sell the newspaper as a wireless edition. Business Insider calculates that:

It costs the [New York] Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

The electronic book may be about to reshape newspaper and magazine reading. And perhaps blog reading too. But who knows how?

Steven Rose: Courting controversy

Steven Rose makes a habit of controversial pronouncements. For three decades he has been in the vanguard of the radical science movement, resisting, above all, the idea of behavioural genetics. It is safe to say that he is not the most popular figure among evolutionary psychologists. In 1985, Rose, Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin published Not in Our Genes, an attack on sociobiology and behavioural genetics. Reviewing the book, Richard Dawkins described it as "a sort of Dave Spart trying to get into Pseuds Corner".

Animal Spirits and the economy

Following my column on psychology and economics, Princeton University press has been in touch to let me know that next month they will be publishing Animal Spirits - How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism.

It is the work of Nobel laureate George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, the author of The Subprime Solution, a brilliant little book on the causes of the credit crunch.

It's another staging post in the merger between behavioural science and economics and I thought you might like to order yourself a copy.

Why I love my Kindle

So the Kindle is on the march.

Time to tell you something that will surprise you. If you love books, you will love the Kindle.

Most of my bibliophile friends recoil at the very idea of an eBook. They say that they love the physical object. And I can see their point. But the Kindle has a number of advantages that will overcome this objection, let me assure you.

The first is the most obvious. It is fantastic for holidays.

For me holidays are for reading. Yes, mountains, lovely. Oh, look, there's an antelope. Mmmm, must go in the swimming pool later. But if you don't mind, for the time being I am just going to sit here and read.

Which means that I have to lug with me huge volumes.

I have a creed. In the eternal struggle between the weight of a suitcase and the need to have a heavy book with you, the book must always, always win.

On my recent trip to Switzerland I took 15 books. Two volumes of the King biog (natch), a book on the Beatles, a Bill Bryson, a huge tome on Lincoln's Cabinet that I bet I don't read until 2015, a massive book on Robert Oppenheimer that my brother insists I read, and a bunch of other stuff.

I didn't need it all. I wasn't going to read it all. Possibly I won't ever read it all. But it didn't matter because it added no weight and took up no space. It was a wonderful liberation.

The second advantage is, well, that the Kindle isn't slick.

The Kindle isn't really a gadget. It isn't backlit, it isn't slinky, it is shiny metal. This is still true of Kindle 2 although it is a little more designed.

In other words, you don't love it for itself. You love it because it gets out the way and let's you read. The illusion of reading an ordinary book is so strong that I found myself several times reaching out with my left hand to turn a page that wasn't there.

The third reason I love the Kindle is that it allows me to purchase a book instantly, as if I was in the shop, even though I am at my desk.

There is one drawback. I found that if I want to flick through a book to find something I vaguely remember being there, then I'd rather have the paper copy. Mildly.

But on the whole, the Kindle is a fabulous device.

Thinner than a CD box and lighter than a paperback, it can be read in bright sunlight, is easy on the eyes, and even feels as if you are handling a book. You can keep up to 200 books on the machine at a time, leaving any others on your PC. The library of available books is growing all the time. What are you waiting for?

What you are waiting for, my wife explained to me, is a moment when you might conceivably need it.

My requirement for a device to help me carry large biographies of General de Gaulle on trips to Turkish beaches is, I accept, a niche one. For lots of people, paperbacks are perfectly serviceable and they don't want to have to charge up their book on the mains.

Fair enough but who asked their opinion?

And the worst book title of all time...

From the blog of the great Stephen Pollard:

Daniel Finkelstein says:

This must be the most enticing book title out there. The moment I saw it, I ordered it.

Evil Genes: Why Rome fell, Hitler rose, Enron failed, and my sister stole my mother's boyfriend

I've got the reverse. Years ago, I won a Spectator competition for the most boring book title of all time. I won with this:

Hospital Purchase Records Containing Grain Price Information in Fifteenth Century Ghent

Yes, it really exists. I was sent a review copy of it.