Dave, point well taken. Another trend I've noticed in the past few years is the practice of giving books of poetry titles that look like anything but poetry. "Motorcycle maintenance" or "Kidney stones." No larks or lilacs, puh-lease.

Dave, one thing about long titles is that then you can write a really short book. Just think about how some creative writer got to looking at some old collections of doctoral theses and thought to herself, How brainy! How tedious! Then looking over some old old novels, which printed a precis of each bit of action at the head of each chapter, these two things together gave the inspiration for long-title books. Michener would roll over.

It seems to me that the colon used to be a little more impliedin the past, when it was on the cover of a book. The main title might appear in a larger font, then a subtitle might appear in smaller type. For instance, Steven Pinker's 2003 book title reads on the cover page as THE BLANK SLATE, then underneath you see "The Modern Denial of Human Nature". When you look on the copyright page, however, there's a colon appearing between "slate" and "the". So perhaps they've been there more often than we thought, but the publishers have only recently been putting them on the covers.

This does not, of course, excuse the fact that the titles themselves are getting stupidly long.

Dahlink, I'm happy to report that a new book of poetry by Elizabeth Spires of Goucher College is called simply The Wave-Maker. It's due out later this month, and the writing is poignant and beautiful.

I'm actually more partial to semicolons, and just as soon as I figure out how to use them, I will. Colon reminds me of an unattractive body part. Hey, how about a colon cleanse? Just a thought. Great article.

here's a call to action in a 2003 issue of the daily princetonian.
the columnist looks at princeton theses throughout the past century and reports that "the colon appears occasionally in Princeton thesis titles since at least the 1920s, but only begins to approach its current rate of infection by the mid-1970s." he gets pretty worked up, though he admits to using colons in his own papers for "extra brownie points" from professors. he claims that "the fact remains that academic writing has always been bloated and self-conscious," and that, for him, it is the "submission to fashion" that offends him most about colon abuse....

oops...here's the link: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2003/05/05/opinion/8165.shtml

Ever think of consulting a Proctologist for your colon issues?

If it takes the author 15 words to get to the point of his book, it's likely the text will be entirely too wordy, as well. Maybe it's wrong to judge a book by its cover, but I have no problem judging a book by its title.

When I was getting my history Masters, I read my share of turgid prose capped with windy titles. I used to joke that someday I would write a paper called "On the Relationship of Colons and Pomposity in Paper Titles." Never did, though! :-D

One good thing about the colon is that it never appears upsidedown.

While I would buy on the spot any book with a properly applied semicolon in its title, I, too, am dismayed by the proliferation of colons (often prefacing frighteningly long subtitles) on book covers these days. Does it bespeak a lack of publisher confidence that anyone could possibly be interested in a book without an extra dash of coaxing? Or do the entitlers feel the need to supply their salesmen with an unswerving pitch for their presentations to bookstore buyers? Or are they generously providing an extra service to their readers given (and I hesitate to say this in light of our respective employments) the continuing disappearance of book review sections and the shortening of critical assessments to not much more than the length of some of the aforementioned subtitles? All of the above?
I can't say. I just wish all concerned would stop affixing "forever" as the terminal word to the post-colon verbiage, as in: "Mahatma Gandhi and Arnold Palmer: How They Met at the Masters and Changed the World of Golf Forever." It's an insult to eternity.

The best use for colons and semicolons is to sex a house cat. If you lift the tail and see a colon, it's a boy. If you lift and see a semicolon, it's a girl. Or was it the other way 'round...?

I had this discussion a few weeks ago at my office. We keep getting these long titles submitted to us for publication. He theorized it's for search engine optimization. Which doesn't really affect anything, but maybe people think it does. The formuala: The title of your book, then all the keywords and power-words associated with it. I keep saying, "What's the inevitable long-term nickname that we're really going to call this, and let's call it that."