Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Very Long Titles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature/meme now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. The meme was originally the brainchild of The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is Books with Super-Long Titles.

I’m late in posting this, but hey, better late than never, right?

There are lots of books with extremely long titles, so to narrow it down, I went through my own shelves (mostly physical) and chose the books I own with the longest titles in three categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Cookbooks. I used the number of characters in the title, rather than letters or syllables, to determine its length. (I didn’t count spaces, but I did count punctuation.) Because spaces and wide letters like “o” and “m” take up more room than slim letters like “i” and “l” and punctuation like commas, some titles look longer than their actual character count.

Fiction

I left out the Harry Potter books, because they would have taken up most of my title space, starting with Philosopher’s Stone, Prisoner of Azkaban and Order of the Phoenix at 34 letters each. If you like, you can mentally stick them those three in place of the last three on this list.

• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Catherynne Valente) – 55
• The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie the Pooh (A. A. Milne) – 39
• The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown (Julia Quinn, et al.) – 39
• The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (DuBose Heyward) – 36
• The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever (Julia Quinn) – 36
• Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake (Sarah MacLean) – 34
• Classic Folk Tales From Around the World – 34
• Irish Folk and Fairytales Omnibus (Michael Scot) – 29
• The Maze in the Heart of the Castle (Dorothy Gilman) – 28
• Between the Devil and Ian Eversea (Julie Ann Long) – 28

Nonfiction

I did not include subtitles. If I had, some of these might have been considerably longer (The Intelligent Traveler’s Guide to Historic Britain: England, Wales, the Crown Dependencies), while other books would have replaced many on this list. For example, consider Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage. The title is only 29 characters; the subtitle adds another 63 characters for a total of 93 characters (counting the semicolon.) But the subtitle is rarely used when referring to a book, and rarely appears in the same font, so I ignored subtitles in considering the length of the title itself.

• The Intelligent Traveler’s Guide to Historic Britain – 45
• The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 – 43
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Managing Your Time (Jeff Davidson) – 41
• How To Get Organized When You Don’t Have the Time (Stephanie Culp) – 40
• The Western Guide to Feng Shui Room by Room – 35
• A History of the English Church and People (Bede) – 35
• How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Orson Scott Card) – 34
• Dos, Don’ts, and Maybes of English Usage (Bernstein) – 34
• The Kings & Queens of England & Scotland – 33
• Bright’s Old English Grammar & Reader – 32

Cookbooks

• Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book – 39
• Fix-It and Forget It Recipes for Entertaining – 39
• The National Trust Book of Tea-Time Recipes – 37
• Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book – 32
• The Best Bread Machine Cookbook Ever – 31

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