Blurbs and Louise Willder: Judging a book by the words on its cover

Representational image (Photo: Varad Parulekar via Unsplash)

Last year, Jeanette Winterson participated in a book-burning event. She was the only person present, and the titles she fed to the fire were her own. In a tweet she explained that this was because the “cosy little domestic blurbs” on the covers of new editions of her books had turned them into “wimmins fiction of the worst kind”.

Fortunately, most blurbs don’t provoke such extreme reactions. One of the earliest brought a memorable poet to his country’s attention. On the cover of a self-published 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman made sure to include a phrase from a letter by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I greet you at the start of a great career.” The rest is literary history.

Most of those asked to contribute blurbs for books fall between two extremes. At one end, there’s Gary Shteyngart, who rarely refuses. “I've compared people to Shakespeare, Tolstoy or whatever,” he once said. “I'll do anything.”

On the other hand, there was American literary critic Lionel Trilling. “If I say yes to all and my little words of praise all appear in the advertisements, I get to look silly and my praise comes to mean nothing,” he wrote to an editor. “If I say yes to this or that one and no to that one or these ones, I am rude and unfriendly. So I must say nothing, which also makes me rude and unfriendly, but in a principled way.” Long-winded but logical.

The creation of blurbs as means of literary persuasion is the subject of Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion, an entertaining and informative new book by Louise Willder. “If you’ve ever been into a bookshop,” she writes, “chances are you will have seen something I’ve written, although my name will never appear”. Willder has worked in publishing for 25 years as a copywriter and, by her estimate, has written over five thousand blurbs.

The language of blurbs has often been ridiculed, especially the use of words such as breathtaking, spellbinding, and dazzling, many of them culled from book reviews. Willder acknowledges the exaggerations but points out that an element of “wonderful imaginative lying” has to be at the heart of writing blurbs.

For Cecil Day-Lewis, the sonnet, the detective story and the blurb were the perfect crystallisation of literary form. Willder provides many pointers to this craft. Using numbers, for example, works well with thrillers: “One house. Two families. Three bodies”, for The Family Upstairs (2019) by Lisa Jewell. Then, the first lines of blurbs are as important as the first lines of books. Consider the blurb for Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley omnibus, which started with the three words: “Liar, psychopath, killer…”

Another technique is to use contrasts. From Robert Harris’s Conclave (2016): “The power of god. The ambition of men.” Structure is important, as is concision. Willder explains that the process of stripping away forces involves you having to focus on what you really want to say. Useful advice for all sorts of writing, not just blurbs.

Plucking the right words from a review or article for a blurb is an art in itself — sometimes nefariously so. Willder mentions author Ben Macintyre’s comment about a then-forthcoming novel by Lance Price on Tony Blair’s former spin doctor: “Perhaps, (Price’s) Time and Fate will be the corking political novel that Blair’s Britain so badly needs, but somehow I am doubtful.” When the book came out, in 2005, the cover carried this ringing endorsement: “The corking political novel that Blair’s Britain so badly needs.”

On the other hand, heartfelt praise can come across as, well, too heartfelt. A case in point is the blurb Nicole Krauss provided for David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (2008). Reading the book, she writes, “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”. Goodness.

Too much honesty also doesn’t make for a good blurb. TS Eliot, who wrote hundreds of them as editor of Faber, composed this for a collection of poems by Louis MacNeice: “His work is intelligible but unpopular, and has the pride and modesty of things that endure.” MacNeice’s reaction is unrecorded.

Roberto Calasso, who also worked in publishing, took blurbs very seriously indeed. Quite wonderfully, he likened them to letters of invitation written to strangers in bookstores. Many of his blurbs are idiosyncratic and enigmatic: “A nervous, phosphorescent mobility of style, an endless germination of images…This book speaks of everything. And it leaves nothing intact.” In contrast, Willder focuses on the voice of the book or author rather than her own, and “who is to say which approach is better: objective or subjective?”

To that question, JD Salinger would have replied: neither. He famously refused to have anything on his book jackets other than the title and his name. More recently, independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions — in the news for having published four Nobel laureates, including Annie Ernaux — has drawn praise for its distinctive and unencumbered blue front covers.

At other times, publishers desperately try and introduce classics to new audiences. Willder notes that the cover of one edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) bears the words: “Mom’s fishing for husbands — but the girls are hunting for love.” In a similar vein, a cover of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) proclaims: “Riotous orgies, with careless women and maddening music and flowing champagne. Yet in all this crowd nobody knew the host.” Both true enough, one supposes.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm, then, is an engaging, witty, and thorough exploration of an often-overlooked aspect of the publishing business. To criticise it, as the blurb for PG Wodehouse’s novels from Punch magazine says, would be like taking a spade to a soufflé.