The History of Book Blurbs

Are Oblivion’s roots Smooth or Sticky? Vikings Gave Us the Word for Hugging

The History of Book Blurbs

Hello,

This week’s word is blurb as book covers are very much on my mind this week. A book’s blurb is the text provided on the back cover to tempt readers into purchasing. If you own any books from before the 1900s, you may have noticed they lack this text and wondered why.

Blurb is actually an eponym (a word added to the dictionary from somebody’s name) and as such appeared in my book “How to Get Your Name in the Dictionary”. To be more precise, it appeared as my blurb on the back cover of the paperback edition. I couldn’t resist. Here’s what it says –

Blurb

A blurb is the short publicity piece on the back cover of a book and, like everything else inside this book, it’s an eponym with an intriguing story attached. In the early 1900s American novels commonly had a picture of an attractive young woman on the cover, regardless of the book’s topic. In 1907 the humourist and illustrator Gelett Burgess (1866-1951) decided to satirise this practice by putting a sickly sweet fictional girl named Miss Belinda Blurb on the cover of his book “Are you Bromide?” Unfortunately his plan back-fired when his book sold so well that the term entered publishing history and all future books included a back cover blurb.

The wonderful reference site, Etymology Online, adds a little more historical background than I could fit in my own blurb. The term blurb appears to have been first used by an American scholar called Brander Matthews in 1906 or possibly by Frank A. Munsey who wrote, in red ink, across the front of his magazine that “this number of Munsey’s the hottest pie that ever came out of my bakery”. Undoubtedly the word was popularised by Gelett and his fictional Miss Blurb.

This morning the first paperback copy of “Words the Vikings Gave Us” with the final cover art arrived on my doorstep. This lovely event would usually trigger me into Book Launch Mode but tomorrow my mother is being discharged from hospital after 13 weeks so all things book are firmly pinned to my “Deal with Later” board while I go into Help Mum Mode instead. Top of the list is replacing her hearing aid which was lost on day one of her stay and annihilated her ability to communicate. Mind your hearing, everybody, it’s very important.

In the meantime, however, you might like to have a sneaky look at the Viking book’s blurb?