The curious history of book blurbs, and do they matter anymore?

Where are you likely to find words like gripping, luminous, spellbinding, and unputdownable together in one place? The answer is simple- on book jackets, of course. They pop up in blurbs, those short endorsements that appear on covers like a rash. A typical blurb is full of superlatives, trying its best to make browsers in a bookshop part with their money.

Revealingly, most blurbs are made up of praise that is both exaggerated and vague. This means that the same adjectives and stock phrases appear again and again. The result is that they can become meaningless, which rather defeats their purpose.

It’s ironic that the word “blurb” was coined as a joke in 1907 by American humourist and artist Gelett Burgess.

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The story goes that he came up with a dummy book jacket featuring a beaming, fictional woman called Miss Belinda Blurb, who was depicted as lavishly singing the book’s praises. Burgess’s intent was satirical; he would have groaned to see how his joke has now become standard publishing practice.

Earlier, blurbs and jacket copy were often more descriptive. They boasted about the author’s reputation, carried praise from the publisher, or made broad claims about a book’s importance. With the rise of mass-market paperbacks, blurbs became tighter, more direct, and more geared towards making a sale.

Some blurbs have become a part of literary lore. The best example can be found on the cover of the self-published 1856 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. On it, the poet took care to include a phrase taken from a letter to him by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” All too true.

Until recently, American writer Gary Shteyngart was known for his fulsome and frequent blurbs. “I’ll blurb anything,” he once said. “I don’t care. It’s like if a coal miner comes up to you and says, ‘They’re closing down my mine, man, can you help me?’ Of course you’ll help.”

Much of this was in the spirit of paying it forward, of being grateful for the recommendations he himself received when he was a fledgling author. However, some years ago, he wrote an “open letter” in the New Yorker announcing his retirement from blurbing.

“During the past ten years,” he wrote, “it has been my pleasure and honour to blurb over a hundred and fifty books”. (Surely that’s an undercount.) “It is with deep sadness,” he went on, “that I announce that the volume of requests has exceeded my abilities, and I will be throwing my ‘blurbing pen’ into the Hudson River during a future ceremony, time and place to be determined”. Sorry, debut authors, Shteyngart has left the building.

Shteyngart’s blurbing career reveals something about how the process works. Most of the time, a blurb is solicited before publication by the author, agent, or editor. Those asked to write blurbs are often old friends and colleagues, or simply those returning a favour, or expecting one in the future. With others like Shteyngart, it’s simply a case of being benevolently disposed towards younger writers.

Do blurbs work, though?

Certainly, in some cases, a favourite author’s recommendation on a cover counts for a lot. However, Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster in the US, has confessed that he doesn’t know whether they’re effective: “There’s no metric to tell.” More bluntly, he added that they could create “an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent”.

Tellingly, his publishing house announced last year that authors under contract with their imprint would no longer be expected to solicit blurbs from other writers. “Trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time,” said Manning. However, “if a writer reads a book because they want to (not because they feel beholden) and comes away so moved by it that they can’t resist offering an endorsement, we will be all too happy to put it to use”.

Manning’s attitude is refreshing, and makes sense. After all, for many people, the actual work of deciding what to read seems to have been largely outsourced to friends and social media algorithms. Perhaps the future of the book blurb lies not on the jacket, but in a friend's text message or a five-second video review.