Time to Ditch the Subtitles?

In Monday's Guardian Robert McCrum wrote an article expressing the thought that nervous publishers ought to ditch book subtitles.  One example cited was John Carey's recent work on William Golding, subtitled The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies - just in case a prospective buyer didn't know who Golding was before shelling out up to £25 for said tome, surmised McCrum.

Do we like or hate subtitles, readers?  And why?

Comments

[Clare D]

American publishers seem to love subtitles more than UK ones - almost every work of fiction seems to have the subtitle such as 'A romance', or even 'A novel'.

In non-fiction I think it makes more sense, as Ian says because sometimes the creative title can be a little ambiguous to say the least.

[Ian]

Subtitles in fiction are predominantly nonsense. In academic publishing it makes sense, allowing the fusion of an imaginative, creative title and a description of what a book is actually about - for example Jonathan Sumption's "Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War III" benefits from a subtitle, but none of this holds true in fiction.

To be honest so many of the ones I've come across recently are such abject guff I've been tempted to document them - Grisham's "The Associate" with "It's a deadly game of blackmail. And they're making him play" is brilliant in it's flaunting of grammar and tautology, while on the cover of the hitherto respectable Christopher Reich's "Rules of Vengeance" you end up with "When everything is lost, it's time for revenge", which is just plain asinine.