The Titles That Changed The World

It's not easy coming up with an original book title, so many authors take the easy way out: they don’t. Several books are simply modern reworkings of well-known titles, the New York Times reports. Think, for example, of History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, which inspired rip-offs such as Chasing Aphrodite: The Decline and Fall of the World’s Richest Museum, and The Decline (And Fall?) of the Income Tax. Then there’s the “changed the world” cliché—in which insignificant things are ascribed earth-shattering importance—such as, Cod: The Biography of the Fish That Changed The World, and Mauve: How One Man Invested a Color That Changed the World. But nowadays, “-onomics,” is all the rage, with titles like Womenomics riding on the coattails of Steven D. Levitt’s 2005 bestseller, Freakonomics.