Talk:Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England'

Punctuation in article title
I was wondering about the single quotes in "A 'Mythology for England being placed around only part of the subtitle rather than the whole of it.

Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere that has the internal pages of the original edition of Chance's work (when she used the Nitzsche surname), so I can't check it myself. The second edition clearly uses no quotes of any kind around the subtitle, but the article should follow the first edition. It isn't consistent with the entry under Sources at the bottom of the page, and WorldCat matches Sources with quotes around the whole subtitle: "A Mythology for England".

Looking at the Manual of Style on titles, I found this: Quotation marks simply used as a form of title stylization on a cover are removed. They are retained within a title when reliable sourcing demonstrates they indicate an actual quotation, or sarcasm. It's not exactly this situation, since the cover title is only Tolkien's Art, but unless the book itself combines title and subtitle with the quotes around only part of the subtitle, then it should be changed here. In addition, since Wikipedia standard is to use double quotes rather than single when there are quotes in the title and/or subtitle, there should probably be some kind of change anyway. Thoughts? BlueMoonset (talk) 17:47, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, the marks are printed in the first edition, I have it here. The phrase is a quotation not just a subtitle. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:28, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
 * But where are they in the subtitle, Chiswick Chap? The article currently has the two different placements of the opening quote mark. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:33, 14 June 2022

'A Mythology for England'

is how it's printed. I've adjusted the article to match. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:45, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Chapters
I believe it's usual to put book titles in italics, and chapter titles in double quotes, so I've put those back. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:06, 18 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I'll stick with that formatting for chapters. However, there are several other titles in double quotes within the text, making the paragraph as a whole hard to understand as a summary of five chapters. I noticed that the five chapters are separated by newlines in the wiki source, but the HTML rendering ignores them. I have therefore doubled the newlines, so each chapter heading starts a new paragraph.
 * This also makes it plain that there are in fact six chapters. -- Verbarson talkedits 16:12, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I find this wholly unjustified. There are five named chapters; the final short fragment is just called 'Conclusion' actually, which astounded other scholars as it covered "The Silmarillion", i.e. the whole of Tolkien's legendarium, as a sort of coda (Chance's own word for it, as it happens) or appendix. I was, therefore, not failing to count to six, but describing accurately the (extraordinary) structure of the book: this I will restore now with a word of explanation in the text. The newlines in the source are purely an editorial choice for convenience while constructing the synopsis, to ensure each chapter is covered: they do not imply a desire for formatting - if you'd asked, I've have told you at once that there was no intention to insert .... or  or any equivalent markup. The great majority of GA reviewers will at once (rightly) demand that the synopsis be defragmented from your very short and choppy paragraphs – two of them are single sentences!, and since you had already made changes which I had reverted, and I had already started this discussion here, your edits constitute frank edit-warring, which is of course unacceptable. I'll leave it for now, but given that the article was in fact already properly formatted and is in the Good Article Nomination queue, most editors would have left it up to the reviewer to comment on if they saw fit to do so. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:20, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I have removed the newlines. I hope the GA assessment goes well. -- Verbarson talkedits 09:00, 20 June 2022 (UTC)