Weird Titles Sell Books

Why do authors and publishers get “clever” with titles? Is it just to sell books, or also to make a point? Let’s take a few examples and see.

Let’s start with Amy Bloom’s A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. This memorable collection of short stories features characters beset by physical frailties or changes: sex change, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, for instance. Bloom’s spare, at times funny, style cleverly carries the weight of sadness, leaving us with an oddly uplifted feeling. I would’ve thought this was a collection of love stories from the title, but perhaps it’s a story of the author’s love for humanity.

Want to take a stab at understanding How To Fossilize Your Hamster by Mike O’Hare? It’s a fun collection of trivia about the natural world and a book of science experiments for adults. And it gets checked out a lot at the library!

Browse the fiction shelves at your local library and you can pluck out such gems as Joe Coomer’s Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God (about memory, archaeology and spirituality); Spitting Off Tall Buildings by Dan Fante (an alcoholic relocates to NYC to start another new life); As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (an academic love story, with a side of physics); and The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill (myth, modern life and interspecies love).  It’s pretty hard to know how these titles came about, but they certainly catch the eye alongside Ivanhoe by Sir WalterScott and The Crater by Richard Slotkin.

Plucking titled treasures from the non-fiction racks may be a novel way to communicate those difficult messages, such as: If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? by Cynthia Heimel; Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? by Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg; It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It by Robert Fulghum; The Kids are All Right by Diana Welch; and Don’t Tell Mom I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse by Paul Carter. These books speak your mind! And these books impart that special knowledge you may not know how to ask for: Does Anything Eat Wasps; How to Avoid Huge Ships by John W. Trimmer; The Thermodynamics of Pizza by Harold J. Morowitz; and Sex, Death and Oysters by Robb Walsh.

In 1978 the Diagram Group invented a publishing prize for the oddest title of a real book, awarded annually. The first winner of the prize was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (various authors, published by Tokyo Press) – sorry, the public library doesn’t own this one. You’ll be glad to note, however, we do own the 2010 winner: Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Daina Taimina.

The reasons we dream up strange titles is only partly to sell books, it’s also just brains at play.

~posted by Jen B.