bewareofitalics replied to your post “My mom bought me my first His Dark Materials book in 2001. It was a...”
Oh wow, it never occurred to me that the golden compass referred to anything but the alethiometer, since it looks like one and kind of points to truth like an actual compass points to north. Do you know if there were alternate names for the other books? It sounds like the titles were chosen to match The Golden Compass.
This is going to be a long af answer, I apologize beforehand.
Curiously, they were not chosen to match it, Pullman wanted to persualde the US publishers to change it, but it didn’t happen and he settled with it. Little did he know that the movie would influence the title in many other countries later on. Here’s a quote from Pullman himself explaining the title thing and how the three being named after objects in the US version was a coincidence:
The trilogy known as His Dark Materials didn't have that name in my mind from the start. In fact it didn't have a name at all; it was just 'the big book'. When I'd finished the first volume and was talking about it with David Fickling, my British publisher, we tried various names and couldn't find one that worked. I knew that the trilogy needed a name, and that each of the books needed its own separate name too (I don't like numbers in titles: THE GODFATHER PART TWO, and so on. Just a fad. But it's my fad). So: what should they be called?
My first discovery was the phrase The Golden Compasses (plural, note). This comes in Milton's Paradise Lost, a poem which inspired me a great deal. The line refers to the Son of God taking 'the golden compasses, prepared / In God's eternal store, to circumscribe / The universe, and all created things."
In other words, these were compasses to draw a circle with, not a compass to find your way with. I liked the phrase, and the trilogy became temporarily, during the publication process, The Golden Compasses. And we finally settled on Northern Lights for the title of the first book.
Meanwhile, in the US, it was being read by the editors at Alfred A. Knopf. Someone decided (mistakenly, but firmly) that the title referred to Lyra's alethiometer, which could be regarded as a sort of golden compass, but of the direction-finding and not circle-drawing sort. So the same someone or another someone decided to refer to the first book, for their own internal discussing-a-forthcoming-book purposes, as The Golden Compass.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, I had found the much better phrase, His Dark Materials, for the title of the trilogy. I quote the passage from which it comes at the very beginning of the first book. Better, because it's more atmospheric, and there's the uncanny resemblance to 'dark matter', which figures largely in the story. So out went The Golden Compasses, and in came His Dark Materials.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, the publishers had become so attached to The Golden Compass that nothing I could say could persuade them to call the book Northern Lights. Their obduracy in this matter was accompanied by such generosity in the matter of royalty advances, flattery, promises of publicity, etc, that I thought it would be churlish to deny them this small pleasure.
So that's it. The fact that all three titles refer to an artefact is no more than a coincidence, though it does make a nice pattern. Before I'd finished the third one, the artist Eric Rohmann, who drew the wonderful covers the books had in their first Knopf editions, asked what the third book would be called, and before I could tell him, volunteered The Sophisticated Monkey-Wrench.
One tiny final thing: my first suggestion for the third book was The Lacquer Spy-glass. My editor at Knopf, Joan Slattery, pointed out that this might be misheard as LACK OF, and that made sense to me; so it became AMBER instead.
Source: Bridge To The Stars, helping out fans since days of old :’)
Since Pullman and the UK team never re-named Northern Lights (the closest it’s got was the tie-in edition of the movie having BOTH NAMES in the cover), I’m gonna assume they didn’t prefer it, even if it made the titles “match”.
With the US market, things were like that since the start and there was no change in the name (there are also some censorship instances in US editions, but that’s beside the point). So, the readership never got an opportunity to get as confused as other markets.
The biggest problem was on how that influenced the non-English speaking markets.
In Spanish, for example, like I said, the movie was called “La brújula dorada”, a literal translation of The Golden (navigational) Compass (as opposed to compás being a drafting compass), so all further editions of the book post movie changed their title, and considering the series has had SEVERAL publishers through the years, it’s a goddamn mess.
For example, you have these three pre-movie editions calling it Northern Lights: this is the one I have, this is the next edition from which I have the 3rd book, god knows when this one was released, maybe before mine. The movie tie-in edition was, like the UK version, the one with both titles on at the same time, and sadly, the latest edition made by the publisher who is translating The Book of Dust, went with the US/movie title of navigational compass, but uses the cover design of the UK Northern Lights latest edition.
As a side note, in Spanish, The Amber Spyglass kept the initial title Pullman wanted for it, it’s called El catalejo lacado, just like he wanted.
To add to that, they translated His Dark Materials as “La materia oscura”. In-book, Dust is referred to as “Polvo”, which literally means “dust”, but with the translation of His Dark Materials to La materia oscura (which is a literal translation but loses the Paradise Lost reference), the Book of Dust was translated as “El libro de la oscuridad” which literally means “The Book of Darkness”. So, yeah, wow, what a journey.
Spanish editions are divergent because the books came out at a time in which publishers were being absorbed by larger corporations in many Latin American countries during the early 2000s, so HDM (much like Harry Potter and other late 90s/early 2000s series) went through several publishers.
In my collection I have the first two books from one edition, the third from another, Lyra’s Oxford in English (it was never translated, or at least not for Latin America), The Collectors in English and digital (ugh), La Belle Sauvage in Spanish and now I will have for Christmas The Secret Commonwelth in English. Once Upon A Time in the North, just like Lyra’s Oxford, was never translated in Spanish, or at least not for Latin America, but differently from Lyra’s Oxford, I could never buy it here, so I’m waiting for the moment when I can finally buy it from abroad, because that’s kind of a mess.
You might be wondering, why if there’s a publisher doing The Book Of Dust and re-editing the trilogy, they haven’t translated Lyra’s Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North and maybe The Collectors as a bonus (like other publishers did for soft released companion stories in book series). The answer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯
This was the longest response ever, I’m so sorry, I just thought it was all interesting information.
