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Those who’ve recognised these titles are probably nodding vigorously. They were the original titles of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Dickens’ Bleak House and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, respectively. Long after the book had become beloved, the author still lamented losing The High-Bouncing Lover as the title for The Great Gatsby!

It makes you wonder what actually gives power and resonance to a book title? In other words, how is a title a title?

There’s nothing resonant about the titles Gone With The Wind (earlier titled Pansy!) or To Kill a Mockingbird (formerly, simply, Atticus) if detached from their books. The Fountainhead sounds even worse. The Catcher in the Rye simply sounds odd. Catch 22 could so easily have been Catch 17 — what Heller first wanted as the title.

Some titles continue to sound like titles even when removed from the book: The Scarlet Letter, for instance, or A Moveable Feast. The Interpreter of Maladies and The God of Small Things are so lip-smackingly good, I can picture their authors smacking their lips in satisfaction.

Amit Chaudhuri seems to invent the loveliest titles. What could be more beautiful than A Strange and Sublime Address? Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadowlines is imaginative and haunting; In An Antique Land is evocative for its formal, classical beauty. English, August feels quaint, and doesn’t mean anything until you begin reading the book. And then the title lights up with rich comic possibilities.

The title that Umberto Eco most wanted for The Name of the Rose was Adso of Melk. His publishers would not let him, and a working title for the book was The Abbey of the Crime. In his postscript to the book, Eco tells us that the final title came purely by chance and he was happy with it because the rose was so rich in meaning as a symbol that it had lost all meaning or any one meaning. “A title must muddle the reader’s ideas,” Eco notes, “not regiment them.”

Authors have used titles to speak of their subject in rich metaphor: Andrew Solomon’s book on depression is titled The Noonday Demon, Jeffrey Masson’s book on the emotional life of animals is When Elephants Weep, Robert Thurman’s classic introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Machine of Tibetan Buddhism (the unusual, scientific-sounding conjunction of ‘enlightenment- machine’ does the work), Richard Preston’s book on the smallpox virus, The Demon in the Freezer, and Pico Iyer writing about lonely places in the world titled his book, Falling off the Map.

Some book titles are so quirky and arresting that even non-readers know them by heart: The Man Who Mistook His Hat for his Wife, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Six Characters in Search of an Author. Some titles have no relation to the work, and the best example of that is a film title: Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”. Long after you’ve finished the film, you still can’t see what it has to do with the film. It mostly doesn’t. It’s a private joke — a mishearing of a French film title, “Au Revoir les Enfant”.

Perhaps the most oddly ravishing title I came across recently is the eccentric fantasy-adventure novel by G.W. Dalquist, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. An unforgettable title, and an unforgettable jacket design that pokes your eyes out from where the book sits on the shelf.

One of the longest titles I have ever read is a book from the 1960s by a writer called Peter Weiss: The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade.

All those beloved classics with proper and personal names — Jane Eyre, Hamlet (!) Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, Madam Bovary, Anna Karenina, Shakuntala, Kanthapura — are now established titles. But how very easily they could have all been known by other names…even for the heck of it I don’t want to speculate what else Hamlet or Anna Karenina or Shakuntala may have been called by their creators.

There are titles that acquire a mystique because of what the book has come to mean, such as Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. Turn that into Out of America or Out of England and the title evaporates. (Her “Anecdotes of Destiny” is really more like it).

One known instance of a famous writer who did not title his work is e.e. cummings, who published a book, all the while insisting it not have a title. Copyright clerks and librarians continue to be haunted by the problem of recording and categorising it.

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