Craponomics

The New York Times has an article by Patricia Cohen about a problem with book titles:

The release of womenomics (by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay) this month is just the latest example of publishers trying to knock off the title of Freakonomics, the best-selling 2005 book by Steven Levitt, an economist, and Stephen Dubner, a journalist. Although some critics initially complained about that book’s “annoying title”, Freakonomics was an instant success, generating, among other things, a column in The New York Times Magazine, a blog on the Times website, and a planned documentary. So it’s no surprise that other authors hope to benefit from the reflected glory. Last summer Obamanomics and Slackonomics appeared. This year Invent-onomics 101 made its debut. And in the fall Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays will hit bookstores.
Capitalizing on popular titles has a long pedigree in the publishing industry. A well-turned phrase can give birth to dozens of offspring. Edward Gibbon’s monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first published in 1776, has inspired variants for more than two centuries. Similarly titled books have chronicled the slide of other empires (the British, Ottoman, Japanese, American, Freudian); institutions (the CIA, the Roman Catholic Church, the American automobile industry, Hollywood, The Saturday Evening Post, the British aristocracy, the American programmer) and eternal ideals (truth and love goddesses).
Awkward appendages have been added, as in Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (Politics and Culture in Modern America). Publishers have demoted the phrase to a subtitle: Chasing Aphrodite: The Decline and Fall of the World’s Richest Museum. Punctuation has been added : The Decline (And Fall?) of the Income Tax— while humorists have intuitively understood its outsize appeal: The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody.
Eamon Dolan, vice president and editor in chief of Penguin Press, explained that the title had to communicate the theme of a book almost instantly, which is why publishers so often use something familiar. A title like Prozac Nation or Fast Food Nation (which Penguin published) “conveys a pretty nuanced constellation of ideas fairly quickly,” he said, and gets across the idea that “our entire society can reasonably be seen through that lens.” At the same time, he added, “the title is trying to do something on an emotional level,” to make the reader pause.
Perhaps that is why titles that make extravagant, impossible declarations are so pervasive. Francis Fukuyama, an international political economist, hit the sweet spot with his influential 1992 post-cold-war treatise, The End of History and the Last Man, which combined hyperbole with a seeming paradox. (Absent a supernova here, how could history end?). Soon publishers were handing us the end of prosperity and the end of poverty; the end of food, which perhaps was the inspiration for the end of overeating; the end of America, followed by the end of American exceptionalism; the end of religion, the end of the Jews (a novel), the end of faith as well as the end of materialism; the end of the present world, the end of your world and the end of the world as we know it; the end of empire, memory, education, free speech, oil, fashion and money; the end of lawyers? (given the question mark, apparently more uncertain than the end of the present world).
At least six books in the past decade have used “the end of the beginning”, including three novels, two histories, and a children’s book called The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant), although in fairness, Winston Churchill, who used the phrase in a famous 1943 speech, should really get the credit. Finally, Robert Kagan, the conservative foreign-policy strategist, turned Mr. Fukuyama’s title on its head with his 2008 book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.
Exorbitant claims are inherent in another title genre: things that have changed the world. That list includes books, ideas, beliefs, decisions, inventions, plants, bridges, gigs, battles, speeches, photographs, and molecules. Some authors prefer a single item: the ocean (Atlantic), voyage (the Mayflower’s), car (Model T), corporation (East India Company), business strategy (franchising), telescope (Galileo’s), painting (Picasso’s Guernica), and Olympics (Rome, 1960). Others favor a set: the five equations, the ten geographical ideas, the twelve books, the fifty battles, the one hundred maps, the 1,001 inventions. Multiple examples, however, raise a perplexing question: which achievement is more impressive, the discovery of, say, the five equations that changed the world or the one (E = mc2) that managed to do the job on its own?
The longer the list, the less likely the chance of wretched exaggeration. Yet somehow the feat does not seem quite as impressive once the numbers increase. Some writers claim to have found the single year that changed the world— A.D. 33 (Jesus’ crucifixion), 1968 (the worldwide youth revolt), or 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall)— yet the historian Margaret MacMillan managed to narrow it down to six months (the half year in 1919 when the four powers hammered out the Treaty of Versailles) before realizing she could do one better and identify the single week (in February 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon traveled to China).
Ultimately, the best locutions are those that credit quotidian, trivial objects with earthshaking influence, like Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky. The more obvious the significance of the subject, the less successful the title. After all, where’s the element of surprise or wit in A Man Without Equal: Jesus, the Man Who Changed the World?
Some of the more unlikely candidates endowed with superhuman powers by authors include Tea: The Drink That Changed the World, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World and Sugar: The Grass That Changed the World.
As for Freakonomics. Mr. Dolan at Penguin Press said that part of its success was its novelty. The first few knockoffs may be able to capitalize on that, but after a while the title and message contradict each other, he added. “You can’t have a sense of revelation with something that’s been repeated four or five times,” he said. The tricky part is gauging just when the magic wears off. “Essentially it works until it doesn’t work,” Mr. Dolan said, “and you hope you’re on the right side of that line.”