If you read a blurb that began as follows would you rush out and buy the book?

“Not since Pericles has such eloquence…”

or…

“In a debut novel that beggars Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens…”

or…

“Once in a millennium an author brings forth a work so exquisitely wrought…”

You may scoff but, according to one publisher, no matter how absurdly hyperbolic blurbs may be, up to 62% of readers are sufficiently influenced by them to purchase the book.

This factoid was produced by Laura Miller, senior writer and co-founder of Salon, in an analysis of blurbs inspired by one so extravagant – for a book by David Grossman – that it could easily be mistaken for a parody. It begins “Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before.” It ends “To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.”

Miller’s disquisition on blurbing may shed some light on the process for civilians who have never thought about where these quotes come from.  Among other points of interest:

• “Blurb” is sometimes mistakenly used for the publisher-generated description printed on a book’s dust jacket — that’s actually the flap copy. “Blurb” really only applies to bylined endorsements by other authors or cultural figures.
• Prominent authors are inundated with far more requests for blurbs than they can handle. They turn down most of them, but “might do it for a good friend or a former student, or as a favor to their editor or agent.
• Positive reviews are hard to write. Authors who aren’t used to writing them write them badly.
• “So why is it done at all? Because you, dear reading public, persist in giving credence to it.”

After reading the Grossman blurb you could not be blamed for believing that nothing more absurd could ever be written. How wrong you would be. Inspired by that blurb, The Guardian has held a contest for the worst one its readers can come up, using a Dan Brown novel as the basis for their sendups.  For some laugh-out-loud There’ll Always Be An England wit read the contest entries in the Comments section of The Guardian‘s article. They are, without a shadow of the doubt, the sublimest works ever produced by the human imagination since our emergence from the primordial muck…

Richard Curtis