Sexy titles

I mentioned in yesterday's print version of my column that the title of Mary Beard's book on Pompei has been punched up for American consumption: "Pompei: The Life of a Roman Town," which you'd be hard-pressed to say is not on the staid side, will become, over here, "The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompei Lost and Found."

What I failed to note was that it's the Harvard University Press that's responsible for the facelift -- a house that's "not usually known for sexing up," as the Guardian, which did notice that fact, put it. "An epic HBO adaptation must be on the cards," adds the Guardian writer. He notes some other interesting title shifts of the past few years, in the highbrow-press category:

Sarah Hall's prize-winning The Carhullan Army was turned into Daughters of the North by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and a similar aversion to unfamiliar names -- which, if made general policy, could threaten any title derived from a place or person -- presumably informs the switch from Miss Herbert, the British title of Adam Thirlwell's study of translation and literary influence, to the US edition's Delighted States, which makes it sound like a book about American literature.

US titles get altered on crossing the Atlantic, too, with Simon Winchester's Joseph Needham biog changed from the soppy The Man Who Loved China in America to the strange, 50s movie title-echoing Bomb, Book and Compass in the UK.

I agree with the adjective "soppy" for the original Winchester title (Needham was a great British sinologist whose classic and elephantine "Science and Civilization in China" had reached 18 volumes by his death in 1995) -- but did a British editor really think "Bomb, Book, and Compass" spelled retail magic?

Via the Harvard University Press Publicity Blog -- a title that itself could use some sexing up. (The Chicago University Press equivalent has the chutzpah to call itself simply The Chicago Blog.)