Authors often gripe about their publishers. Academic authors can be particularly rude about academic publishers who (to generalise wildly) are seldom able to provide the editorial hand-holding or high-profile publicity opportunities some trade houses can claim to offer.

This may all be true, but I want pay tribute to a seldom-praised skill ¨C academic publishers¡¯ cunning choice of subtitles.

I have obviously been aware for years of the habit of giving books and articles attention-grabbing titles followed by subtitles that explain what they are actually about (and feature the key words likely to be picked by search engines). This seems a perfectly sensible way of combining marketing with accuracy, but I can¡¯t claim to have given the topic much thought. It is only recently that another aspect occurred to me: the situation of people reading books in public.

I interview authors and write a good deal about books for ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ, and these are often at the ¡°human interest¡± end of the academic spectrum. A recent example was Sex Addiction by Barry Reay and others (Polity Books). This is a sober and well-researched analysis of the whole notion of ¡°sex addiction¡±, which it essentially argues is a mythical phenomenon (a very academic and useful thing to do).

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But it also has a mildly raunchy cover and the title Sex Addiction - and I found myself reading it on the Tube.

If it had been missing a subtitle (or had one like ¡°a self-help guide¡±) I would probably have died of shame. The dull but respectable ¡°a critical history¡± did a great deal to spare my blushes.

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Something similar applies to Jacki Willson¡¯s celebratory account of burlesque artistes and performance artists who parody and challenge traditional female stereotypes from within. This showcases a cabaret performer dressed as Marie Antoinette on the cover and is titled Being Gorgeous.

Since I didn¡¯t aspire to gorgeousness even at 16 or 26 (and certainly don¡¯t at 60), it is probably an even more implausible book for me to be seen reading ¨C and I did get some pretty odd looks on the Metropolitan Line.

Say what you like about publishers, I will always be grateful to I.B. Tauris for including the reassuringly serious subtitle Feminism, Sexuality and the Pleasures of the Visual, even if the typeface is in pink.

matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com