Literal Titles
Book Titles Containing a Letter

I remember distinctly seeing the paperback edition of Andy Warhol's a in the Coop, and thinking, "My God, now I have an excuse to buy V and Z, and then I can look for the other 23!" I didn't, but since then I've felt a collector's twinge whenever I've spotted another one-letter book title.

• a, Andy Warhol;
• c, Thomas Sowell;
• C, Maurice Baring;
• "C", Anthony Cave Brown;
• E, Matt Beaumont (Published in 2000. An epistolary novel in which email is employed);
• G, John Berger;
• H, Elizabeth Shepard;
• H., Lin Haire-Sargeant, (Heathcliffe returns);
• K, Mary Roberts Rinehart;
• K., Ronald Hayman, (a Kafka biography);
• M, John Sack, (the story of M company in the Vietnam war);
• N, Louis Edwards;
• O, Omari Grandberry;
• P, Andrew Lewis Conn;
• Q, Stephen Leacock;
• Q, Luther Blissett (pseudonym. Published in 2004, translated from Italian, and the work of four authors);
• S, the English translation of a book written partly in English and partly in French, by seven authors, with the French title Semaines de Suzanne;
• S., John Updike;
• V, Thomas Pynchon;
• W ou le souvenir d'enfance, [W, or the Memory of Childhood] by Georges Perec, a member of Oulipo, and author of "La Disparition" in which no "E" appears;
• X, Sue Coe;
• Y: the Last Man, Brian Vaughn et al (Initial publication 2002, a graphic novel, in which all but two bearers of the Y chromosome have died off);
• Z, Vassily Vassilikos.

Close but no cigar, to:

• CDB, William Steig;
• The D. Case, Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini pick up Dickens's unfinished "Mystery of Edwin Drood";
• DC, Gore Vidal;
• I, etcetera, Susan Sontag;
• N or M?, Agatha Christie;
• The Story of O, Pauline Reage;
• RUR, [Rossum's Universal Robots], Karel Capek;
• U and I, Nicholson Baker.
• Z for Zachariah, Robert O'Brien;
• (is an element of), Jacques Roubard; the actual title is the mathematical symbol used to indicate that an object belongs to a set; the book is a collection of 361 poems, each corresponding to a move in the game of Go;

Thanks to Stephen Frug for two friendly letters and new examples!

One nice thing about the idea of this collection was its finiteness. I wouldn't be needing a lot of storage, even if I managed to get a complete collection!

You can go to the wordplay home page.