This Article Sucks But Your Mom Was "A TOUR-DE-FORCE!" (OR:The Wonderful World of Misquoting)

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Here's a nice read for a lazy Sunday evening: New York Times frequent contributor Henry Alford has an essay in the Online Sunday Book Review today about the seedy underworld of ridiculous misquoting for book jacket blurbs. Everyone kind of knows that it goes on with movies all the time, with hyperecstatic quotes ranging from cherry-picked to made-up to being taken from Ain't it Cool News, but I'd never given too much thought to what goes on with books. You'd think publishers would be above all that, wouldn't you? Eh, of course not.

Call it misblurbing. We’d like to think that while the quotations in movie ads regularly feature near-hysterical raves from marginal or even nonexistent critics, the genteel world of book publishing is above all that. (editor's note -- I know, right?!) But that doesn’t seem to be the case, and some say publishers are becoming only more brazen. “It’s gotten much worse recently,” said Po Bronson, the author of “What Should I Do With My Life?” and a member of the board of advisers of Consortium, a book distributor that specializes in independent publishers. “There’s a feeling of, ‘Ah, no one’s looking anymore.’ ” The liberal editing of promotional verbiage can extend even to blurbs that publishers ask successful authors to provide for less-established ones. “Usually they come back with changes and say, ‘Is this O.K.?,’ and it’s very different from what I gave them,” Bronson said.

The funniest part of the article is the defensiveness with which the editors justify their actions, citing a sort of moral hierarchy to the remodeling of praise (or what passes for it) in which outright making things up is the worst offense, festive sprinklings of exclamation points warrants a sideways glance at most (despite drawing ire from the inimitable Sarah Vowell), and anything else in between is subject to a sliding scale of scorn or condoning.

Taking words or sentences out of context is one level down, while extracting the sole positive comment from a negative review is at the bottom, if it’s an offense at all. “We have a threshold here,” Richard Nash, the publisher of Soft Skull Press, said. “If it’s a B review or above, we’ll look for the positive. But you can’t take something that’s a C+ or below and pull positive stuff out.”

The novelist Laura Zigman, a former publicist at several houses, admits to getting a bit creative with the ellipses when excerpting reviews on her Web site. “Sometimes you have to eliminate 9 or 10 words to find the praise in there,” she said. “I’ll sit and think, ‘Oooh, there’s something salvageable.’ You’re demented. It gives you this weird sense of control and make-believe.” Zigman suggests there should be a rule: “Like, there has to be five words in a row from the review.”

Yet another reason why the best books are usually described with full, coherent sentences where the number of letters isn't eclipsed by the number of ellipses. Perhaps not "news" per se, and definitely not shocking when you really think about it, but if anything it's just another friendly reminder not to believe every single little thing you read. Especially when it's taken out of context.


"Readers be warned...This Article...is...dictionary...Girls'...finest...tour-de-force...achievement...complex [and] lavish...riveting." ~ Various Artists


Image: New York Times

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