or, is this part something besides a subtitle?

October 24, 2012 5:52 PM

Is there a name for that Victorian(?) thing where a work, usually a novel, has a second, alternate title?

I'm thinking specifically of the thing that'll show up on a title page like

Jack Smith

[illustration]

or Adventures Most Perilous

Being the tale of etc. etc.

Sometimes it's all on one line. I'm pretty sure I've seen it parodied as much as used in earnest, and it seems weird now that I'm blanking on real examples. I'm pretty sure there are books on my shelves that do this, I just don't know which at the moment.

Does this phenomenon have a name? If so, when was it actually a common practice? Any idea why?

This seems like one of those things that ought to be easy to ask Google, but I'm coming up blank. Thanks!

posted by brennen to media & arts (10 answers total)

A subtitle.
posted by faineant at 5:57 PM on October 24, 2012

It's just called the subtitle, and it's still a fairly common practice, in some genres more than others.

It's hard to get the whole idea of a book into the few words of a book title--which is why someone invented subtitles.
posted by amyms at 5:58 PM on October 24, 2012

Good enough. I appear to have been overthinking the question.
posted by brennen at 6:03 PM on October 24, 2012

I appear to have been overthinking the question.

FWIW, I don't think you were overthinking it at all. Those older kinds of subtitles you were referencing SHOULD have a separate and distinct word to describe them. They used to be so much more fanciful and interesting, now they just seem to be utilitarian.
posted by amyms at 6:16 PM on October 24, 2012 [4 favorites]

It's also that they've taken to dropping the "or" as of late. So I can see how Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus feels syntactically different from Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
posted by RobotHero at 6:36 PM on October 24, 2012 [6 favorites]

That does seem to warrant something more specific than just subtitle. That Wikipedia Page has an awfully random list of supposed examples, but Dr Strangelove is a good one for the topic at hand.

Didn't Rocky & Bullwinkle use that convention also?
posted by TheSecretDecoderRing at 8:01 PM on October 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

Can't help on the name (though I do feel that there should be a term for ludicrously extended subtitles). But as to when and why it was a common practice: I'd just think of it as an early form of the cover blurb, dating from an era when it wasn't practical to print much on the cover. Think about how effective modern book design is in signalling various characteristics of a book before you pick it up. From across the room, you know whether a book is a textbook, a cookbook, or a novel. Probably even whether it's a literary novel or an airport novel. In an era without this well-developed plumage, the title page was probably the most convenient place to provide a potted summary.
posted by pont at 8:17 PM on October 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

The Hobbit or There and Back Again is another one of those sort of whimsical-sounding ones. It's the kind of thing there should be a TVTrope for.
posted by NoraReed at 9:24 PM on October 24, 2012

You're not necessarily overthinking, just committing the (frequent on MetaFilter) error of assuming that knowing a name for something is equivalent to understanding it.

I always hypothesized that these extended subtitles must have had some root in printing technology / book store display practices, since they appear to attempt to convey a condensed version of the book's promise.

Perhaps there was no way to print normal size text on leather covers or books, being expensive, were displayed behind glass or not to be touched by people browsing, so all you could see before getting the shopkeeper to show it to you was the title?

Since listing examples seems to be required for book cred in this thread, I'll give you Locke.
posted by themel at 10:49 PM on October 24, 2012 [1 favorite]

Themel wrote: "I always hypothesized that these extended subtitles must have had some root in printing technology / book store display practices, since they appear to attempt to convey a condensed version of the book's promise."

Until the 19th century, most new books were sold unbound. The purchaser would have them bound to match other books in their library, or if they were less well off, in a simpler binding.

Since there was no wrapper or dust jacket, the title page took on the task of advertising the book, leading to some incredibly detailed title pages. This title page, from the 1693 London edition of Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, is an example. Note that the title proper (Wonders...) is set in tiny print, because the publisher figured that "Tryals of several Witches Lately Executed in New-England" would be more likely to catch a potential buyer's eye.
posted by brianogilvie at 9:08 AM on October 25, 2012 [2 favorites]