Book title: pragmatics, poetics and evolution

We consider history of the book title and how its role in the book and its place in the book edition changed. It also addresses the problem of studying the title of a book in Russian and foreign practices from the point of view of its poetics and functions, both in close connection with the text of the work, and with the help of the “distant reading” method. It is also being reviewed some current trends in book naming in modern publishing practices, such as the extensive use of citation and allusion techniques, the desire to reduce the title to a few characters, as well as the use of the letters of the Latin alphabet. The problems of the connection between the title and the genre of the novel and the structure of the title are also described. Separately, the question of the responsibility of the editor when working with the title of the translated work is raised. With concrete examples the problems of choosing the title of a book in the process of editorial preparation were analyzed,as well as some errors that the editor may make, dwelling on one or another variant of the title. We use the analytical-synthetic method of research. At the end of the work there are the main conclusions from the study.