Book (15) Title Science (1)

New Directions authors have written books with the widest variety of subject matter, voices, themes, and styles imaginable. Within all the variation, however, is a universality that makes each book, no matter how experimental, feel at least a little familiar. This is best exemplified by the titles of ND books: looking through our catalog I was struck by how some words appeared over and over again. I was intrigued, and decided to track the repetitions. So, here’s my “rigorous” breakdown of common words in our titles, with number of occurrences in parenthesis.

New Directions authors can’t get enough of the natural (4) world (5). Seasons (2) are prevalent, and it’s the first thing that drew my attention:
Summer (6)
Spring (4)
Winter (3)
Autumn (1)

              

There’s some interest in weather (0):
Snow (4)
Rain (3)
Wind (1)
Hot (1)

And water (1) of all sorts is popular:
River (8)
Sea (3)
Wave (3)

Sun (8) kills moon (3), and desert, forest, seed, field, flower, mountain, garden, and rock all make multiple appearances. Earth (7) appears in some strangely similar titles:
Kingdom of Earth (Tennessee Williams)
Residence on Earth (Pablo Neruda)
The Bones of the Earth (Carol Jane Bangs)
Last Evenings on Earth (Roberto Bolaño)
The Rise of Life on Earth (Joyce Carol Oates)

Night (13) beats day (8), but light (11) triumphs over dark (7) and shadow (5). Good (2) and great (4) both beat evil (1), but angels and devils are each written into 4 titles. ND authors were less concerned with time (5) than I expected—moment, month, year, morning, evening, afternoon, hour, early, late, end, and beginning only show up a few times. And no one authors worry about the minutes (0) or seconds (0).

Sleep (3) beats awake (2), and dreams (5) are better than both. Life/live is the grand champion, appearing in 24 titles. That’s about 2% of our total catalog. Death is in a mere 8 titles.

The human (3) body is another subject:
Heart (12)
Eye (5)
Foot (2)
Leg (1)
Blood (1)
Skin (1)
Arm (1)
Flesh (1)

And humans themselves, with only 5 women to 11 men:
Child (4)
Girl (5)
Boy (0)
Mother (2)
Father (3)

There’s quite a few animals, particularly birds, including herons, bluebirds, crows, hummingbirds, and woodpeckers. Butterflies, crickets and locusts round out the insect department, with the more menacing snakes, wolves, tigers, and jaguars also making appearances.

America appears 9 times, Europe and Russia 3 times, and Asia twice. Baden-Baden and Casablanca only once each, surprisingly.

ND titles are sweet (3), full of love (15), paradise (3), friends (5), and … milk (3)? A few anomalies include one-time appearances of pornographer, cripple, amorous, drunken, nun, samurai, and werewolf.

And then there are some true title masters, like Henry Miller, who, throughout his career managed to use many of the most popular words, sometimes twice in a title!
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
The Nightmare Notebook
The Cosmological Eye
A Devil in Paradise
The Wisdom of the Heart
Into the Heart of Life
The Books in My Life

What works for Henry Miller definitely isn’t too good for me. Whoever writes The Love of Man with the Heart of Night and Life in the Sun House might have the next New Directions masterpiece.

-Kate Abbey-Lambertz