I’ve often got book titles muddled in my head before wondering what they would be like if they had really existed.
How, for example, would these presumed lost works stand up as literature, as classics?
- A Timely History of Briefs: possibly a soft-porn title to be kept under the counter?
- Shady Gifts of Feys: a fairytale of bondage and more, perhaps.
- The Unbearable Importance of Being Lightly Earnest: a lost title by Oscar Kundera — or was it Milan Wilde? I get confused.
- Noh Country for Omens: Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens adapted by Cormac McCarthy for the Japanese stage.
- You Rang, M’Lord? A lost episode of Downton ghost-written by Tolkien, originally titled The Rings of the Lord.
- Scents and Sensitivity: Jane Austen’s handbook on allergic rhinitis and other aspects of hay fever, edited by Noel Coward.
- Tender Is The Knight: prequel by Sir Walter Scott Fitzgerald in which Ivanhoe gets saddle-sore.
- A Room of One’s Own with a View: the tale of Rapunzel re-imagined by Woolf and Forster.
- The Angry Caterpillar: the diary of a butterfly larva with IBS.
- Alice threw the Working Class: how Dodgson’s heroine rose above her humble origins to graduate from Oxford debt-free.
Suggestions below, please, as to the kind of mash-ups you wouldn’t mind seeing on bookshelves.
Calmgrove 