Boundary condition

Last summer, when we were shaking down the code for the books project, I would use the book Moby-Duck as a test case to make sure that the database schema could accommodate its preposterously long subtitle, The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost At Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. (Hmm, it looks like mighty Amazon doesn’t choose to deal with the subtitle’s vastness.) (Also, we liked to use the book’s forbear, Melville’s Moby Dick, as an example of a book with a ridiculously large number of editions in and out of print and with and without the hyphenated title.) Bill Morris poses the question (but doesn’t answer it conclusively), “Are Run-On Subtitles Literature’s New Flop Sweat?”