Horizontal titles

Roger (Lathbury) had encountered a glitch: despite the ample space he'd given the lines, despite the wide margins, the book was still not thick enough for the title -- or Salinger's name, for that matter.

Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year

Joanna Rakoff

I omitted one significant detail from my review of Joanna Rakoff's My Salinger Year two days ago. Rakoff worked for the literary agency representing J.D. Salinger in 1996, during the period Salinger was entertaining the idea of authorizing publication of his last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1924" (printed in The New Yorker in 1965) in book form. A small publisher in North Carolina was being trusted with the job, although Little, Brown had published his previous books.

Salinger had strict guidelines about how his books appeared in print, guidelines still being followed since his death. He insisted on plain, one-color covers, for example, without illustrations. The Catcher in the Rye is the only one of his books with a cover illustration, but that is only because it appeared that way originally, before he issued his edict about plain covers.

A more recent Salinger demand was that his titles appear horizontally across the spine of his books. Examining the books in my own Salinger collection, I find that only Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction has a horizontal title on its spine. This was the last Salinger book published and the last one I purchased, soon after publication in 1963.

Normally a horizontal title would have two requirements: a thick book and a title containing short words. Raise High the Roof Beam meets neither. It is just 248 pages long, and the title contains the words carpenters and introduction. Thus the title on the spine is in a font size barely larger than the body type, which looks larger than normal to make the book longer.

Looking at other books on my shelves I see relatively few with horizontal titles. All are relatively long books, such as Lonesome Dove, a couple of Donna Tart novels (The Secret History and The Little Friend), Joseph Heller's Good as Gold and The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber. Nonfiction books, especially biographies, tend to be fatter, so horizontal titles are more common. This is the case with Robert Caro's books about Lyndon Johnson and William Manchester's books on the life of Winston Churchill.

But Hapworth, although it took up most of that issue of The New Yorker, is at best a novella. A horizontal title on the spine just didn't work, for there was very little spine. Finally Salinger himself decided to take up the challenge, and he came up with an original compromise: a diagonal title.

That, like the book itself, never came to pass. The publisher made the mistake of speaking with a member of the press about the book, the planned publication of which became public when he applied for a Library of Congress number. Salinger pulled the plug, and that was that. Too bad. It would be fun to see a diagonal title on my shelf. It is odd enough to see titles that run south to north rather than the traditional north to south down the spine. They always look like a printing error. Perhaps Hapworth would have looked the same.