string replace and display problem

[Anon]

I've only just started learning PHP so bare with me..

I want to display book titles alphabetically but some titles are in the format "The Blah Book" and I want to display them as "Blah Book, the" and order them by this new first letter (ie the above is "B", not "T").

To my understanding there are three options:

1. a mysql select query
   I don't know how to structure this but a friend said for some other database it might be in the format:

SELECT DECODE(SUBSTR(title, 0, 4), 'The ',SUBSTR(title, 5) || ', The', title)
FROM novel
ORDER BY title

can anyone re-interpret that for me to work with mysql?

2. php substr and then sort
   If I'm only listing the titles then it works perfectly.

But for the page, I first get the name of an author and then display the titles which correspond to them - at this point the page starts sprouting the title multiple times (my error obviously but i don't understand what I've done wrong).

3. manual change
   Change the titles through my admin page but I really would prefer not to resort to this.

any assistance with code snippets for 1 or 2 much appreciated.

niina