Six Things, Volume 97
Titles | Images | SNL | Music | Comfort | Newsstands
Thing 1 – Titles
This is utterly inconsequential, silly and useless. But I’ve spent the afternoon putting it together, so I’m afraid I have to share it.
The thing that occurs to me every time I have to think of a title for a book is just how annoyingly hard it is. Keeping in mind the old brainstorming adage “there are no bad ideas”, you throw yourself into it and soon discover that oh yes there really are lots of bad ideas and they’re the only ones you seem capable of having.
In order to ‘research’ the subject – the title-conjuring isn’t urgent – and as a distraction from writing, I went on a bit of a wild title chase. What, I wondered, are the shortest book titles? Short titles can be good – punchy, memorable and so forth – and I soon found that there are authors who have taken the concept to its logical extreme.
So here, to kick us off, are 25 one-letter book titles. The only one I couldn’t find was R – do let me know if you can think of one. Or perhaps write it yourself to fill that little niche.
X – Sue Grafton (she did of course do the whole alphabet as far as Y, but died before she could start “Z is for Zero”. “X” is the only single-letter title in the series, though.)
And let’s throw in a couple of punctuation mark ones for good measure.
From letters to numbers is a small enough leap of the imagination. Given the phenomenal success of the most famous Number Title of them all, it’s faintly surprising that there aren’t more such books – there might only be one spare slot in the alphabet series, but there are loads of gaps in the Number Title market.
What I was looking for was not book titles with numbers in them (there are thousands of those), but books whose titles consist of numbers alone. Of course, the algorithm-pandering fashion for “Title: Long Explicatory Subtitle” means quite a few possible candidates are disqualified (including, before you write in, “2001: A Space Odyssey”).
Anyway, here are the ones I found. No doubt you’ll be able to add to the list.
11/22/63 – Stephen King (I think it counts)
And close but no cigar for:
And finally, because you’ve already scrolled half a mile and we’re still only on Thing 1, the longest book titles.
Here, The Guinness Book of Records is no help at all. They say that the longest book title contains 4,558 words and 27,978 characters, and was written by Dr. N Srinivasan. Quite literally huge if true. I wanted to check this out, and it turns out the e-book’s available on Google, so entirely in the interests of research I enriched Dr. Srinivasan to the tune of £1.12 to assuage my curiosity – remember, I do this stuff so that you don’t have to.
Here are the first 100 words of the title:
“Stock Price Prediction, a referential approach on how to predict the stock price using simple time series, how to predict the stock price using intuitive analysis, how to predict the stock price using N-Gram, how to predict the stock price using Lexicon analysis, how to predict the stock price using Tokenization, how to predict the stock price using Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average, Regression (ARIMA) algorithm, how to predict the stock price using classification algorithm, how to predict the stock price using price sentiment algorithm, how to predict the stock price using median, how to predict the stock price using mode…”
And so the long day wears on.
Now I don’t know about you, but in my book that’s cheating. The title of the book is Stock Price Prediction; the rest is guff.
I don’t know what the actual longest book title is, but here are some I like:
No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again – Edgardo Vega Yunque
And to My Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I Won Off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game – David Forrest
Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems – David Rakoff
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit – Charles Bukowski
How to Write Ten Different Best Sellers Now in Your Spare Time and Become the First Author on Your Block Unless There's an Author Already Living on Your Block – George Kirgo
Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds – Dav Pilkey
Thing 2 – Images
Right. Enough of that nonsense. Have a look at the Public Domain Image Archive – a fantastic resource comprising over 10,000 public domain images for you to browse, download and use however you like. Cracking stuff.
Thing 3 – SNL
Talking of cracking stuff, this edit of clips from 50 years of music performances on Saturday Night Live is superb.
Thing 4 – Music
If you want an illustration of roughly what has happened to the music industry over the last 50 years, this is at the very least a good starting point.
Thing 5 – Comfort
Thing 6 – Newsstands
And finally, Trevor Traynor’s collection of photographs of newsstands is charming and strangely beguiling.
Your fellow Substacker Tom Cox has a novel (and very good it is too) called 1983. It was published last year by Unbound (who apparently haven’t yet paid Tom the royalties they owe him).
Was wondering why Luther Blissett might have called his autobiography Q and that has led me into a whole new Thing.