Inside Books: What’s in a name?

This is the second instalment of Emily Rhodes’ Inside Books series.

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but anyone with even a poor sense of smell and negligible knowledge of botany will have noticed that some roses smell sweeter than others. The same goes for the names of books. As some titles evidently smell particularly sweet, there can be some rather unexpected bookish twins.

Last week, several children — and a few doting parents — rushed into the bookshop to ask if we had Inheritance. I had to quell my initial instinct to show them Robert Sackville-West’s Inheritance, his very good book about Knole. Strange I thought, when confronted with a ten-year-old boy apparently keen to learn about a stately home, perhaps he’s buying a present for a parent.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that they were asking for a different book altogether.