Q. A few years ago, Vox published an article making a distinction between titles, subtitles, and “reading lines” for books (“ ‘A Novel’: An Article,” by Eliza Brooke, February 14, 2019). The article claimed that when a work has the form of Title of Book: A Novel, “A Novel” is not a true subtitle but instead “explains its contents to a potential reader and serves as a useful signpost when you’re rooting through an unsorted stack of books.” How should these “reading lines” be treated in citations? If they appear not solely on the book cover but also on the title page, it would seem to me that they should be treated as a subtitle. Is that right? Or should these reading lines be omitted since they are not real subtitles as argued in the Vox article, and if so, what is a good guideline for distinguishing them from subtitles?
A. Assuming authorship and other relevant details have been supplied, most books can be identified from a main title alone. Subtitles are often informative, though, so we would advise including them in the titles of books that have them at least once, as on first mention or in a full note or bibliography entry.
But we agree with the Vox article that a subtitle that merely identifies a book’s genre isn’t a proper subtitle. The phrase “A Novel” does that, so you can leave it out, even if it appears on the title page (see also CMOS 13.91). By contrast, you’d want to include a subtitle like the one for the book All the Ways We Said Goodbye: A Novel of the Ritz Paris, by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White (William Morrow, 2020).
Not that there’s anything wrong with including a generic subtitle in a source citation, especially if it appears on the title page. But when that subtitle is shared with countless other books and doesn’t say anything special, it’s usually safe to omit it.