And, just as today, the book itself was used as a piece of marketing. For example, in the back of one late medieval book a scribe called Herneis writes: ‘If someone else would like such a handsome book, come and look me up in Paris, across from the Notre Dame cathedral.’ Or in a fifteenth-century Dutch book: ‘If you like this copy of the Old

the six-word memoir, some of which were published in a book called Not Quite What I Was Planning, including such gems as Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Revenge is living well, without you’, and Joan Rivers’s ‘Liars, hysterectomy didn’t improve sex life!’

‘The le Carré covers were a conscious attempt to revive the copy style of the type-only Gollancz covers from the early 1960s, when book covers were used as marketing vehicles, often written directly in the voice of the publisher. The language is high-flown but has an appealing authenticity to it – you feel the enthusiasm of the publisher for the

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.’

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

Terry Pratchett mounts a faultless defence of what he calls a ‘ghettoised’ genre: The first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning. They did not complain about the difficulties of the male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some Midwestern college

Charlotte Brontë explained the decision to use male names: ‘We did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at the time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called “feminine” – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.’

To quote the doyenne of the double meaning Dorothy Parker again: ‘There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.’

It’s a similar story with the flap copy that Orwell wrote for the first edition of Animal Farm, published in 1945 by Secker & Warburg.40 In clear, measured tones, it tells us: It is the history of a revolution that went wrong – and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for each perversion of the original doctrine.