Memorable but cryptic

Have you ever heard of these 14 alternative book titles that never were?

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Titles are our first introduction to books. From what we gather on the cover, we expect to get a glimpse of the journey the writer will take us on. But have you ever finished reading a book and still not known why it was titled that way? While some authors include passages that explain their chosen titles, others prefer to preserve the mystery or leave room for interpretation. Let’s decode some catchy yet enigmatic book titles!

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Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns penned Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, the text that Holden Caulfield misquotes in the book written by J.D. Salinger, and which gives the novel its title.

In a fantasy, Holden imagines himself standing in a field of rye, catching children who are playing near the edge of a cliff before they fall into the abyss—just as he longs to protect them from the hardships of growing up. Previous short stories by the author featuring Holden had been named Slight Rebellion off Madison and I’m Crazy.

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Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is known by an alternative title in some countries: **Fiesta**—a clear nod to the novel’s Spanish setting and the celebratory atmosphere of the bull runs.

However, on second thought, the author decided to change the title to shine the spotlight on the novel’s exploration of morality. He ultimately chose The Sun Also Rises, drawing inspiration from the Bible—specifically, a passage from Ecclesiastes: "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose."

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A captivating title that sets us up for a nostalgic—and lengthy—book. Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece almost had a far less poetic title: The House. Thankfully, he reconsidered and chose One Hundred Years of Solitude.

This multigenerational family saga is marked by characters who experience isolation—both from the world and each other. Fun fact: Márquez reportedly struggled with the title until the phrase came to him in a moment of inspiration while driving.

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Robert Burns did it again! This time Robert Burns’ poem To a Mouse was the inspiration for Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men which includes the famous line: "The best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry."

Since the novel explores themes of shattered dreams and fragile plans, Steinbeck’s choice was both poignant and literary. Interestingly, he almost titled it **Something That Happened**—a name so vague it could apply to nearly any book!

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This title is one of the most intriguing on the list—reminiscent of a modern essay or a TED Talk. Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic is thought-provoking from the very start. Published in the late ’60s, it was ahead of its time in exploring artificial intelligence and what it means to be human versus machine.

The Electric Toad was one alternative title the author considered. And in case you didn’t know, this book was indeed adapted for the big screen—under a much sleeker name: Blade Runner.

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Cormac McCarthy didn’t originally plan to write a novel at all—it started as a screenplay! But the title was set from the beginning.

The story, centered on Sheriff Bell and his sense of displacement in a violent world, takes its name from the opening line of W.B. Yeats’s poem Sailing to Byzantium: "That is no country for old men."

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Did you know that Faulkner’s famous work could have easily been mistaken for a vampire fantasy romance novel? He originally considered naming it Twilight instead of The Sound and the Fury.

Thankfully, he opted for a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The title reflects the chaotic narrative of the Compson family’s decline, as well as the futility of their struggles.

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It was going to be called **The Harvest Gypsies**—not quite grand enough for what would become John Steinbeck’s celebrated novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

It was his wife, Carol, who suggested the final title, inspired by Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic, which includes the line, "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." The phrase perfectly encapsulated the novel’s themes of suffering, resilience, and the fight for dignity during the Great Depression.

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Offred was the original title Margaret Atwood had for her novel—a fitting choice, as it’s the name of the narrator and protagonist. However, she ultimately changed it in a nod to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, where each story is told from a different character’s perspective.

In this dystopian novel, it is Offred, a repressed woman forced into childbearing, who tells the story.

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Toni Morrison’s Beloved almost had a completely different title: The Six-Minute Gap. This referred to the time it took for the schoolteacher to arrive and stop Sethe from killing her children—a pivotal moment in the novel.

Morrison cleverly shifted to Beloved, the name of an important character, but also a haunting and mocking title to tell the story of a mother tortured by her past decisions.

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Gravity's Rainbow and **Mindless Pleasures**—neither title reveals much about the story, yet both were considered by Thomas Pynchon for his novel.

The final title may sound poetic or philosophical, which could be intentional. But, strictly speaking, it has a concrete meaning: it refers to the arc of a V-2 rocket’s flight—a parabola shaped like a rainbow, the consequence of gravity. This trajectory serves as a central symbol in the book.

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Joseph Heller coined the term Catch-22 to describe a nonsensical bureaucratic rule that torments the main character in his novel. The phrase resonated so strongly with readers that it became synonymous with paradoxical dilemmas.

Originally, Heller planned to title his book Catch-18, but editors urged him to change it to avoid confusion with Mila 18, another novel. He briefly considered Catch-11 and Catch-14 before finally settling on _Catch-22_—a choice that would make literary history.

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Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children originally had a slightly different working title: Children of Midnight. The term refers to children born at the precise moment of India’s independence, who, in this magical realism novel, possess extraordinary powers.

Rushdie has said the title came to him early and stuck—fortunately so, as Children of Midnight sounds more like a spooky bedtime story than a sweeping epic about identity and destiny.

Oops!

The incredible stories behind 10 famous typos and misspellings in history

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Blunders are part of life. As human beings, we can all make mistakes, especially when writing or typing. A simple slip of the fingers on the keyboard might be nothing more than a joke among friends, but throughout history, there have been some typos that meant much more than that, from millions of dollars lost to huge controversies and scandals. If you want to know which mistakes could have led to such consequences, here are 10 of the most notorious typos in history!

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The title of this entry is not a new or unknown word but a typo in the inscriptions of one of the most important monuments of our country.

We're talking about none other than the Lincoln Memorial, the landmark honoring our 16th president in Washington, D.C. Built between 1914 and 1922, the memorial has part of President Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address -delivered on March 4, 1865- inscribed on its north interior wall. But a mistake occurred during the engraving: the word "future" was carved as "euture."

The extra line that turned that F into an E was filled in and fixed. However, if you get close enough, you can still see traces of that original E on the monument wall.

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Have you ever read the word "dord"? Do you know what it means? Probably not, and it's not because your vocabulary is lacking but because no one knows!

"Dord" is a fake or ghost word that appeared in the 1934 international edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. One of the editors mistakenly interpreted a note that said "D or d." The note indicated that "D" or "d" should be used as abbreviations in certain parts of the dictionary, but the editor read that note as a whole word: Dord.

The term appeared in the dictionary for several years until another editor noticed the error and removed it.

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Probably the most famous website in the world, Google got its iconic name due to a typo.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were creating the company, they chose the word "googol" as the name for their search engine. But what does it mean? "Googol" is the mathematical term for the number 10 raised to the power of 100.

However, when they first typed it in to register the domain, they accidentally entered "Google." Luckily, they loved the typo and decided to keep it; the rest is history!

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What if we told you that there's a Bible that reads, "You shall commit adultery." Believe it or not, in 1631, a Bible was published in London that incorrectly listed that phrase as the Seventh Commandment. Of course, that wasn't an actual religious principle but an accidental omission of the word "not."

That Bible caused a scandal in Europe, receiving nicknames such as "the wicked Bible," "the adulterers' Bible," and "the sinners' Bible." Because it was so controversial, the British government ordered all copies to be destroyed, which is why only a few exist today. In addition, the printers were fined 300 pounds, about 30,000 dollars in today's money.

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If it hadn't been for an error in a spacecraft's guidance system, perhaps we would know more about Venus, the hottest planet in our Solar System.

The mistake we're talking about was a missed hyphen in the spacecraft's software code. Although this may not seem like a big deal, the consequence of that typo was huge: The 1962 Mariner 1 mission, which was launched with the intention of orbiting Venus, lost contact with Earth shortly after launch!

Surprisingly, a simple missed hyphen caused an entire mission to fail.

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NASA may have lost thousands of dollars due to their mistake, but there had been others who got exactly the opposite.

In the 1980s, a woman earned 10,000 dollars due to a typo! It was the owner of a travel agency who chose to promote her business in the Yellow Pages, but something went wrong. The ad came out with a misspelled word: instead of promoting the agency's "exotic trips," it advertised "erotic trips."

The woman decided to sue the Yellow Pages publisher for the damages her company received, and she won!

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Remember Popeye the Sailor? He had a secret to super strength: spinach! Today, we know that spinach is much like other green leafy vegetables, but for years, it was believed to have extraordinary qualities. And it was all because of a typo!

In the 19th century, a German chemist was nutritionally analyzing spinach. But when it came time to write down the results, he made a mistake. He meant to write that spinach contains 3.5 milligrams of iron per 100 grams. Instead, he accidentally wrote that it contains 35 milligrams! Later, the myth gained even more strength thanks to Popeye's amusing adventures.

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As we've seen in this article, prestigious institutions can also make mistakes sometimes. That was the case with the National Hockey League in 1972.

The Stanley Cup is one of the oldest trophies in the NHL, characterized by something special: it's engraved with the names of the players, coaches, and owners of all the winning teams. However, the trophy is also known for having several typos.

When the Boston Bruins won the Cup in 1972, they didn't expect what would happen next. Their team name was misspelled on the silver cup, which curiously read "BQSTQN BRUINS"!

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We all have a deep appreciation for our Constitution, the document that defined the ideas and principles that formed our nation. But even in a paper as important as this one, you can find some peculiar details.

In the original US Constitution, you can read the word "Pensylvania." As you can see, the state's name is missing an N. According to the National Archives official website, the author of this detail was none other than Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. From the 18th century on, the most commonly accepted spelling was and still is "Pennsylvania," making the word in the document a grammatical error according to today's standards.

However, when the Constitution was drafted, it wasn't a typo, as "Pensylvania" was actually an accepted spelling back then.

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The US Constitution is not the only site where Pennsylvania's name is spelled differently: the iconic Liberty Bell bears a similar "typo."

The great bell of more than 2,000 pounds is inscribed with a Bible verse and the words, "By Order of the Assembly of the Province of Pensylvania for the State House in Philada." The word "Pensylvania" is typed just like in the Constitution. As you know, the name of the state wasn't standardized at that time, so there were also other accepted ways, including the less frequent "Pennsilvania."

If you visit the Liberty Bell at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, you can still read the word as it was written then.