Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs, Writing Tips, Literary Folklore and Publishing Secrets

For example, the title page for a 1672 reprint of a book called The Famous Game of Chesse-play shows two nattily dressed bearded men at the board and guarantees that readers will learn ‘more by reading of this small Book, than by playing of a thousand Mates. Now augmented in many material things formerly wanting.’

Colin Greenland’s eight-word mini-story: ‘Aliens disguised as typewriters? I’ve never heard such—’

In Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve, which looks at classic literature through data, Ben Blatt conducts his own version of the Bechdel Test: if a novel describes male actions three times as much as female actions, it doesn’t pass. The answer, which will surprise no one, is that almost everything apart from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie fails. He a

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in 1862. Hugo’s publicity manager hit on the idea of generating some advance buzz for the novel by promoting it through a billboard campaign. According to David Bellos, ‘twenty-five illustrations of the characters of the novel commissioned for the illustrated edition that would appear a year later were printed on poster

In 2019 the Emilia Report (named after England’s first published female poet, Emilia Bassano) analysed coverage of male and female writers and found that women were twice as likely to have their ages referenced – or, in the case of Sally Rooney, her appearance, ‘like a startled deer with sensuous lips’, according to one Swiss critic.

By the time books were an industry in the eighteenth century, advance ‘blurbs’ were too, displayed at the front of a book. These had reached such effusive heights that in the opening pages of Shamela, his 1741 satirical riposte to Samuel Richardson’s smash hit Pamela, Henry Fielding writes a mock endorsement from ‘John Puff, Esq.’. Comic parody quo

‘This is a book for those who are neither ashamed of being Englishmen, nor satisfied with England as it now is.’

Italo Calvino: ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’

recent retro cover designs for le Carré’s Smiley novels, created by David Pearson