Title Deed: How the Book got its Name

Fly Fishing was at first just a title: it appeared in the famous Yellow Pages ad in which an old man, one JR Hartley, makes telephone calls to bookshops asking for a book of that name and, after much searching, finally finds it and announces himself as its author. Then the sports-writer Roddy Bloomfield sensed an opportunity. He contacted a bona fide fly-fisherman, Michael Russell, to write the book of the ad, and in Christmas 1991 Fly Fishing by JR Hartley shifted an eye-watering 130,000 copies in hardback. It was followed by two sequels, J?R Hartley Casts Again and Golfing by JR Hartley. Two other examples of 'fictional’ titles spawning real books are L Sprague de Camp’s Necronomicon, drawn from the non-existent book by HP Lovecraft, and Philip José Farmer’s Venus on the Half-Shell, a realization of a fictional work by Kilgore Trout (himself the fictional creation of Kurt Vonnegut).