Blurbs can be a delicate matter in the book world. They can make or break a literary friendship.
Strolling through Dymocks with a friend recently, I spied a book with a rapturous blurb from“I wrote that,” I told my friend, wiping away a little tear of pride. I didn’t mean that I wrote the book. I meant that I wrote the blurb. More precisely, I meant that I had, many years ago, written the book review from which the blurb had been culled.On the back of the same book were longer blurbs from other people.
Quite often they emanate from close personal friends of the author, who want to remain close personal friends of the author. Now there was a blurb you could trust – not just because Jonson leavened it with some words of dispraise, but because Shakespeare was dead when he wrote it. Plainly, Jonson wasn’t just blurbing Shakespeare in the hope that Shakespeare would one day blurb him.Writers can do crazy things in quest of a blurb. When Norman Mailer finished his third novel,, he sent a copy to his hero Ernest Hemingway, hoping the great man would favour him with a blurb for use in the print ads.
American author Gore Vidal, pictured, and Christoper Hitchens got into a nasty public spat about a blurb.Closer to our own day, Christoper Hitchens and Gore Vidal got into a nasty public spat about a blurb. When Hitchens published his book“I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an heir, aA couple of years later, the two men bitterly fell out, and Vidal took the extraordinary step of trying to retract his blurb.
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