Blinda Blurb (TRP mentioned, but "NP" as such)

[Burns, Erik]

foax:
"who blurbs a lot for a literary spook"
whatever.
etb

++++++++++
Magazine
BLURB INFLATION
GAIL CALDWELL

09/22/2002
The Boston Globe
THIRD
Page 12
(Copyright 2002)


A s with so many of modernity's perils, the word "blurb" is a product of the
20th century. Its etymology is charming in a tawdry sort of way: In 1907,
the American poet and cartoonist Gelett Burgess drew a dishy, sycophantic
blonde for a comic book cover, gave her some invented attribution, and named
her Miss Blinda Blurb. Hence the seeping into the lexicon of blurb as both
noun - "a short highly commendatory and often extravagant publicity notice,"
citation Webster's Third International Dictionary - and, in contemporary
publishing practices, as aggressive verb. To blurb is, in the best of
circumstances, to endorse, praise, and extol; more commonly, it is also to
fawn, inflate, embroider, perhaps even lie. Miss Blinda being the pristine
exception, blurbers are real people who ascribe real names to their
flattery, whether Thomas Pynchon (who blurbs a lot for a literary spook) or
a self-designated cyber- critic (marycontrary237, see more about me!). No
book seems safe these days from an excess of back-jacket blurbs, which also
means, dismayingly, that no book's worth is authenticated by their presence.
As a reviewer who sees hundreds of advance proofs each season, I used to pay
some attention to blurb, if only as an imperfect means of literary triage.
If a first novel came in with a quote from, say, Philip Roth or Alice Munro,
it suggested a modicum of quality. If galleys bore several such notices, it
meant either that the book was the sterling ex cep tion or that its editor
had called in a lifetime of favors. But rarely can I recall a blurb making
any difference in the editorial consideration, favorable or otherwise, that
the book received.


Why, then, the growth industry of blurbing, which has become exponential in
the past several years? The more often that an author lends praise to a
book, the less his or her credibility, at least as spin artist. And, yet,
far too many distinguished writers persist in firing off vague hyperbole or
even bunkum for undeserving work. My particular favorites are the sly
blurbs - the ones that promise much but, in fact, say nothing. "Blow Your
House Down is a gusty, gutsy first novel," writes Hopstead Famous. "You can
almost hear the wind in the willows!" Another indicator of market saturation
is the recent addition of booksellers' commentary to the jacket.


"A riveting first novel of Dickensian proportion!" raves Herbert Peppercorn
of Lion's Share Books. Gosh, maybe. But does anyone much care what Herb
likes, and is his opinion really going to increase sales?


The indiscriminate raving of authors about one another's work was documented
for a while in Spy magazine's column "Log rolling in Our Time," wherein the
editors gleefully exposed just who was scratching whose authorial back. The
practice has a panoply of motives, not all of them pretty; the best are
filled with passionate intensity, and the worst - well, blurb can be a form
of public toadying posing as conviction. "Quid pro quo," one novelist told
me, too offhandedly, when I asked her how she justified blurbing an author
who had praised her in the past. Too many people in the industry rely on
such casual mores, assuming that blurb shouldn't be held to any higher a
standard than, say, truth in advertising.


Such attitudes may be cynical and even unethical, but are hardly surprising
in today's E!-speak climate of meaningless descriptors. ("If one says that
King Lear is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller," wrote
George Orwell a half-century ago, "what meaning is there in the word
`good'?") And let's face it: With her gosh-gee sweet talk, the saucy yet
obsequious Blinda Blurb personified what was already a fine tradition. In
the mid-19th century, several eminent newspaper reviewers were found to be
employed by the very book publishers they praised; if they weren't writing
blurb, it was only because the concept didn't yet have a name. As far as
hyperbole is concerned, one need only look so far as Melville's anonymous
review of a Hawthorne collection, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (the two later
became friends), to get a particularly flowery whiff of it.


Nowadays, the stakes have changed: Competing with thousands of new books
released each season, publishers will do anything to gain a foothold in a
desperately crowded field. From a Darwinian point of view, blurb may seem
like an efficient means of thinning the herd. But just imagine the advance
quotes that might accompany On the Origin of Species were it published
today: "Revolutionary!" "Sure to make `natural selection' a household
phrase!" "Gives you a whole new way of thinking about God!" Or not.