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Listellany
Original Titles of Novels
Very few great novels would have been better with their early titles. I should report, though, that some people did not take this list seriously. The original title of The Very Hungry Caterpillar was not Murder at Midnight, Michael Deacon. Nor, Tom Chivers, was Wuthering Heights going to be called Captain Zapstar and the Death-Robots of Omnicron 19.
1. The Man of Feeling Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
2. Strangers from Within In the care of Faber editor Charles Monteith, William Golding’s novel emerged as Lord of the Flies, according to Faber editor Richard T. Kelly
3. Pop, girls, etc. The working title of High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby
4. Catch-18 The first chapter of my favourite novel was published in a magazine under this title, but it clashed with Leon Uris’s Mila 18
5. The Last Man in Europe A lot of nominations for Nineteen Eighty-Four
6. Trimalchio in West Egg One of many horrible titles dithered over by F. Scott Fitzgerald before he decided on The Great Gatsby
7. The Kingdom by the Sea Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
8. The Ends of the Earth The title of Douglas Adams’s proposal for a radio series, which was originally called "Fits". It ended up as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
9. The Dead Undead Several nominations, including from David Tuck, for the working title of Bram Stoker’s book, which became The Undead and then Dracula
10. Tomorrow is Another Day Margaret Mitchell was just going to use the last line of Gone With the Wind
11. And finally, it is not a novel despite containing elements of fiction, but Four-and-a-Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice was published as Mein Kampf
Douglas Adams Quotations
Everyone knows that 42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. But Douglas Adams gave us many more memorable sayings, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, scripts for "Doctor Who" and elsewhere. Here are ten of the best.
1. "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." The Salmon of Doubt
2. "If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat." The Salmon of Doubt
3. "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it." The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
4. "Ford! There’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out." The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
5. On asking for directions: "My own strategy is to find a car... which looks as if it knows where it’s going and follow it." The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
6. "The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life." Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
7. "Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot." Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game 1985
8. "A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”’ An interview in the Daily Nexus in 2000, reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt
9. "'Life,' said Marvin dolefully, “'oathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.'" Even better than Marvin the Paranoid Android’s better-known line: "Life? Don’t talk to me about life." The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
10. "Clixby (adjective): Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly unin- formative." The Meaning of Liff, co-written with John Lloyd
Listellany: A Miscellany of Very British Top Tens by John Rentoul is out now from Elliott & Thompson for £9.99.
