How true.
Or, for that matter, how untrue.
To test this assertion, this might be called the Local-Habitation-Or-A-Name theory of titles, and without leaving my seat, I turned to one side, and examined, on the bookshelf that is nearest to where I often sit, the titles of the books that had been helter-skelteringly shoved rather than shelved, on the fourth shelf up from the floor, the very one that swims with a gentleman’s sidestroke into my retinal ken because it floats in mid-air at the level of my basilisk eye.
And here is what I found:
Bend Sinister
Pale Fire
Invitation To A Beheading
Lolita
The Gift
Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man
Ulysses
Finnegans Wake
The Third Policeman
War and Peace
Dead Souls
Great Expectations
Our Mutual Friend
The Pickwick Papers
Vanity Fair
Pride and Prejudice
Moby Dick
The Return Of The Native
Paradise Lost
Memoires d’Outre-Tombe
Reveries d’un promeneur solitaire
A la recherche du temps perdu (3 Pleiade vols.)
Les Choses
Vie : Mode d’emploi
Exercises de style
Il Barone rampante
Città invisibili
The Invasion of the Bears Into Sicily
The Periodic Table
Libera Nos a Malo
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee
And I glancingly took in, on the shelf just above, the one fifth from the floor, other titles, many of them appearing more than once, suggesting that they are perennial favorites:
Ballads
Lyrical Ballads
Poems
Selected Poems
Collected Poems
Last Poems
Poesie scelte
Anthologie de la poésie française
Odes and Epodes
Plays
Collected Plays
Essays
Collected Essays
Selected Essays
Sobraniye Sochineniye
Of these many titles then, only three (though a very important three)—Ulysses, Lolita, and Moby Dick –consist of “a name [i.e., of a person] or a place.”
Anecdotal evidence, but possibly (it all depends on you, dear reader, and your readerly reception) antidotal.
