In a hotel in Louisville once, I overheard the guests in the lift. They were attending the Kentucky state convention of colonic hydrotherapists. At the time, I wondered: What do they do in their hotel rooms between sessions?

Last week I wondered if I could get them into joint session with the American Publishers' Association, whose members definitely need their colons washed out. I had been writing an essay for the Common Review in Chicago on second world war revisionism and had just finished the bibliography.

Check out some of the titles I cited. Clive Ponting's Armageddon: The Reality Behind the Distortions, Myths, Lies and Illusion of World War II; Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation; Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World.

You will note: Notwithstanding the fall of empire, there is a rampant high tide of colonisation. You will also detect an agenda. These books are trying to tell or warn potential buyers that they will not be getting the conventional "good war" fought by the "greatest generation".

David McCullough's publishers felt no need to rename his book 1776: The War in Which the Brits May Not Have Been Quite as Evil and King George Not Quite as Tyrannical as Our School Histories and Walt Disney Told Us.

Colons have been a staple of academic publishers for many years. After all, no academic ever lost tenure by stinting on words. Certainly, with some published theses you get the impression that the academic assessors weighed them in the balance – literally. And their titles reflect it. Now they have colonised even popular non-fiction titles like those above, and I can testify that publishers adorned my own books with subtitles. They felt that short, pithy titles like The Alms Trade, Rum or Deserter all needed a mini-foreword to be pinned to them.

Indeed, word is that the internet is making it worse. Publishers want to put as many keywords in the title as possible to get the click-on traffic for online buyers. However, this expansion used to be mostly for non-fiction titles. Now Nicholson Baker is breaking the boundaries. His Human Smoke tries to get the best of both worlds, a creative Dos Passos cut-and-paste-style work masquerading as history. Most historians, even tendentious ones, may have mentioned Hitler's part in declaring war on the US. Baker's addition of the colonial subtitle lends a spurious historicity and academic rectitude to his polemic, while dangerously introducing the colon to creative works. Think of what would have happened to George Orwell's snappy title. 1984: One Man's Discovery that Big Brother is Indeed Big but Hardly Fraternal and that Sex with Comrades Can Have Torturous Consequences. You can forgive Herman Melville for adding "or, The Whale", to Moby Dick, since, firstly it has no colon, and secondly, when he published it no one would have had a clue what it was all about. However, Moby Dick: How Ishmael Lost His Shipmates and Found His Soul While Chasing Jungian Archetypes Around the Globe and Carrying Out Experimental Marine Mammal Research, does not really cut the wasabi for the sushi. Better still, imagine trying to get a plot summary behind a colon for one of Dickens's discursive novels, or for that matter, imagine summarising War and Peace in a snappy subtitle. No, it's all gone too far. We must all cleanse our colons.