A Title of One's Own
Dear readers, in the month since I started this Substack newsletter, you have almost doubled in numbers, and I have well over 100 subscribers. I am grateful that so many of you are willing to spend your time reading essays about books.
Since one of the purposes of this newsletter is to interest people in reading, I need to find more potential readers. Alas, I’ve always hated marketing, but I can’t escape the need for it.
To reach out to more people, I need to rename this publication. Its current title is “Claire’s Substack,” which is awkward and unilluminating — and used by several other people. To find alternatives, I did what any person who is bad at marketing but needs to reach out to a larger audience would do in 2025: I told ChatGPT what my Substack was about and asked it to suggest titles. ChatGPT is excellent at marketing. It has distilled all the self-promotion on the internet.
Henri Rousseau, Exotic Landscape (1910). Apparently Rousseau never left France, and so this was exotic indeed. No, this is unrelated to ChatGPT, but I thought you might need a break by now.
The most promising titles are below. Interestingly, ChatGPT seems to like leaf motifs. Perhaps I should have stressed the importance of audiobooks a bit more when I queried it about titles; ChatGPT seems to think that reading is a mysterious activity that occurs on something called paper that has leaves. But still … the leaf-related titles that ChatGPT came up with are not bad.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Autumn Leaves (1924).
Here are the leaf-themed titles:
Loose Leaves
Leaf and Line
The Turn of the Leaf
That last one has a bit of a Henry James feeling to it. Interesting.
And here are two more possibilities. The first was initially suggested by ChatGPT as “The Rag and Bone Reader.” Pretty good, but likely to be confused with rag & bone, the New York fashion brand. So I’ve changed it to “The Rag and Bottle Reader,” a nod to the rag and bottle shop in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, about which I’m releasing a post on Thursday.
The other comes from the duck-billed reader I’ve used as my site logo. As discussed here, the duck-billed reader is an inexplicable figure that appears in The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch painted a duck-billed creature reading a book in a pool next to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (see below). So I could be consistent with my logo and call this publication “The Duck-Billed Reader.”
Detail of Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500). Obviously, the yellow-highlighted detail of this detail is my addition.
I would appreciate receiving your opinion via the poll below.
The one I choose will become the title as of March 20. Thank you.
-Claire Laporte