When I was young, I read a lot about baseball. I knew all the stories. So I couldn’t pass up this program featuring baseball authors Dan Epstein, Josh Wilker, and Joe Bonomo.

Among other selections, the program included readings by Epstein from his book, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of 76 and by Wilker from his book, Cardboard Gods: An All American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards. And Bonomo read Roger Angell excerpts to promote Bonomo’s forthcoming book, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell, a Writer’s Life in Baseball.

What did these books (and the program itself) have in common besides baseball? Colons. Remember when book titles didn’t have colons followed by a descriptive phrase? It was War and Peace, not War and Peace: A Russian Tale of Five Families in the Time of Napoleon.

This led me to look for and discover an article about the trend toward “colonization” in book titles, thus proving that there’s an article somewhere online about anything you can imagine.

My examination of colons (colonoscopy?) aside, this was yet another of the American Writers Museum fine programs. But remember when you went to bookstores (remember bookstores?) to hear writers, and celebrities pretending to be writers, talk about their books? For example, I remember seeing Gene Hackman discuss his book (for which he had a cowriter) Wake of the Perdido Star: A Novel (good thing his publisher included the colon and that explanation, otherwise I might have thought it was a painting) in 1999 at the Michigan Avenue Borders (RIP).

Despite my nostalgia for brick and mortar bookstores, I have come to prefer reading ebooks. And here I am writing a blog, for which, it now occurs to me, I may need an expanded title that includes a colon, and phrase to follow, if I want to expand my reach.   I’m thinking about Art Gets Out: A Blog That Has Nothing To Do with Hotels or Facebook (by far the two most searched for keywords according to PageTraffic.