What Do You Call Those Reviews on Book Covers

Brusk promotional written slice accompanying a creative piece of work

This article is nearly a brusque summary of a slice of piece of work. For the print-on-demand publisher, come across Blurb, Inc.

A blurb is a short promotional slice accompanying a piece of creative piece of work. It may be written by the author or publisher or quote praise from others. Blurbs were originally printed on the dorsum or rear dust jacket of a book, and are at present also found on web portals and news websites. A blurb may introduce a newspaper or a book.

History [edit]

Gelett Burgess circa 1910

In the US, the history of the blurb is said to begin with Walt Whitman'due south drove, Leaves of Grass. In response to the publication of the showtime edition in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson had sent Whitman a congratulatory letter of the alphabet, including the phrase "I greet you at the beginning of a great career": the following year, Whitman had these words stamped in gold leaf on the spine of the second edition.^[ane]

The word blurb was coined in 1907 by American humorist Gelett Burgess (1866–1951).^[two] His short 1906 book Are You a Bromide? was presented in a limited edition to an annual trade association dinner. The custom at such events was to have a dust jacket promoting the work and with, as Burgess' publisher B. W. Huebsch described it, "the motion picture of a damsel—languishing, heroic, or coquettish—anyhow, a damsel on the jacket of every novel".

In this example, the jacket proclaimed "Yes, this is a 'BLURB'!" and the film was of a (fictitious) young woman "Miss Belinda Blurb" shown calling out, described every bit "in the act of blurbing." The name and term stuck for any publisher's contents on a volume's back cover, even after the picture was dropped and just the text remained.

In Frg, the blurb is regarded to have been invented past Karl Robert Langewiesche around 1902. In High german bibliographic usage, it is usually located on the 2d page of the book underneath the one-half title, or on the dust cover.^{[ citation needed ]}

Books [edit]

A blurb on a volume can be whatever combination of quotes from the work, the author, the publisher, reviews or fans, a summary of the plot, a biography of the author or simply claims about the importance of the work.

In the 1980s, Spy ran a regular feature chosen "Logrolling in Our Time" which exposed writers who wrote blurbs for one some other's books.^[iii]

Blurb requests [edit]

Prominent writers can receive big volumes of blurb requests from aspiring authors. This has led some writers to plow down such requests as a matter of policy. For example, Gary Shteyngart announced in The New Yorker that he would no longer write blurbs, except for certain writers with whom he had a professional or personal connexion.^[4] Neil Gaiman reports that "Every now and again, I stop doing blurbs.... The hiatus lasts for a year or ii, and so I feel guilty or someone asks me at the right time, and I relent."^[5] Jacob Grand. Appel reports that he received fifteen to twenty blurb requests per week and tackles "as many as I can."^[6]

Parody blurbs [edit]

Many humorous books and films parody blurbs that deliver exaggerated praise by unlikely people and insults bearded as praise.

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail – "Makes Ben Hur look similar an Epic"
• 1066 and All That – "We look forrard keenly to the appearance of their last piece of work"

The Harvard Lampoon satire of The Lord of the Rings, titled Bored of the Rings, deliberately used simulated blurbs by deceased authors on the inside embrace. One of the blurbs stated "One of the two or three books ...", and nothing else.

Film [edit]

Movie blurbs are part of the promotional entrada for films, and ordinarily consist of positive, colorful extracts from published reviews.

Movie blurbs accept often been faulted for taking words out of context.^{[7] [eight] [9] [10]} The New York Times reported that "the blurbing game is also evolving every bit paper motion picture critics disappear and studios get more comfortable quoting Cyberspace bloggers and movie Web sites in their ads, a practice that notwithstanding leaves enough of potential for filmgoers to exist bamboozled. Luckily for consumers, there is a cavalry: blurb watchdog sites have sprung upward and the number of Web sites that aggregate reviews by established critics is steadily climbing. ... Helping to keep studios in line these days are watchdog sites like eFilmCritic.com and The Blurbs, a Web column for Gelf magazine written past Carl Bialik of The Wall Street Periodical."^[11]

Slate wrote in an "Explainer" column: "How much latitude do movie studios take in writing blurbs? A fair amount. There's no official check on running a misleading picture show blurb, bated from the usual laws confronting faux advertising. Studios practice have to submit advertising materials like newspaper ads and trailers to the Moving-picture show Association of America for approval. But the MPAA reviews the ads for their tone and content, not for the accuracy of their citations. ... As a courtesy, studios will oft run the new, condensed quote by the critic before sending information technology to print."^[12]

Many examples be of blurb used in marketing a motion-picture show beingness traceable straight back to the movie's marketing team.^[13]

References and sources [edit]

References

1. ^ Dwyer, Colin (27 September 2015). "The Curious Case Of The Book Blurb (And Why It Exists)". NPR . Retrieved 30 September 2015.
2. ^ The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Linguistic communication. Ed. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Printing, 1995. p. 132. ISBN 0521401798
3. ^ "Spy: The Funny Years". Diverseness. Retrieved 25 August 2014.
4. ^ Shteyngart, Gary. "An Open Letter from Gary Shteyngart". The New Yorker.
5. ^ "American Gods Weblog, Post 36".
6. ^ Writers's Vocalism, Oct 2015
7. ^ Reiner, L. (1996). "Why Motion picture Blurbs Avoid Newspapers." Editor & Publisher: The Fourth Estate, 129, 123.
8. ^ Bialik, Carl (January 6, 2008). "The Best Worst Blurbs of 2007: The 10 most egregious misquotes, blurb whores, and other moving picture-ad sins of 2007". Gelf Magazine . Retrieved February 28, 2013.
9. ^ Sancton, Julian (March nineteen, 2010). "Practiced Blurbs from Bad Reviews: Repo Men, The Bounty Hunter, Diary of a Wimpy Kid". Vanity Off-white . Retrieved Feb 28, 2013.
10. ^ McGlone, Matthew S. (2005). "Contextomy: The Fine art of Quoting Out of Context." Media Culture, & Lodge, Vol. 27, No. 4, 511-522.
11. ^ Barnes, Brooks (June half-dozen, 2009). "Hollywood'due south Blurb Search Reaches the Blogosphere". The New York Times . Retrieved Feb 28, 2013.
12. ^ Beam, Chris (Nov 25, 2009). "'(Best) Film Always!!!' How Do Picture Blurbs Piece of work?". Slate . Retrieved February 28, 2013.
13. ^ Silverish, James (3 October 2005). "How to flog a turkey". Guardian Unlimited. London. Retrieved 22 May 2010.

Sources

• The story of Miss Belinda Blurb at wordorigins.org
• Original dust jacket at the Library of Congress

Bibliography [edit]

• John Carter; Nicolas Barker (2004). "Blurb". ABC for Volume Collectors (eighth ed.). ISBN1584561122.
• Blaise Cronin and Kathryn La Barre (2005). "Patterns of puffery: an analysis of not-fiction blurbs". Journal of Librarianship and Computer science. 37. doi:10.1177/0961000605052156. S2CID 40272839. (Includes bibliography)
• "'Riveting!': The Quandary of the Book Blurb", New York Times, March vi, 2012

External links [edit]

Wait up blurb in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Quotations related to Blurb at Wikiquote

woodleyjoull1972.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blurb

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