A Ballyhooed Book, or Just a Bunch of Blurbs?

I had to smile a bit when I heard about the ethical storm brewing after reviewers of a book by the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson claimed that their negative comments had been mangled by the publisher to make them seem positive — and then printed on the book’s paperback edition. The smile isn’t because of any particular opinion about Peterson. It’s because a concern about the jacket quote as inaccurate snippetry is as old as the word itself.

Blurb is the rare word whose coinage is actually known. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary: “Said to have been originated in 1907 by Gelett Burgess in a comic book jacket embellished with a drawing of a pulchritudinous young lady whom he facetiously dubbed Miss Blinda Blurb.” Burgess was a humorist. In an address to the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association, he uttered a gurgling sound he labeled a “blurb” — which he defined for the group as the sound of a publisher trying to sell a book.