The end of the blurb, thank god

NEW DELHI: Are you sitting down? In what the trade publication Publishers Weekly reported as a “stunning” or “tour de force” development, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint has announced it will no longer require authors to provide promotional blurbs for their books.

If you’re still standing and breathing normally, chances are you’re not an author. Be grateful! All these years, you have been spared the indignity of going on bended knee, begging people — generally more eminent than you — to sprinkle holy water on your manuscript.

If you are an author — a blurbee, as it were — you’re probably uttering hosannas of thanks to the publisher of S&S, Sean Manning, for this benison. And if you’re a blurber, that is, on the receiving end of requests for unction, your hosannas may even be more fervent.

Asking for praise is an undignified business. It is inherently awkward, especially if the person you’re asking is an acquaintance, friend or, worse yet, someone who sells more books than you do (in my case, roughly 98 per cent of the author-sphere).

I know this from experience. After six books and almost two decades of mendicancy, my knees had to be surgically unbent. They weren’t the only damaged part of me. My self-esteem was so low, my self-loathing so high that I avoided mirrors. Dear Mr Updike, I know you must hate getting letters like this, but I was wondering if you’d drop whatever you’re doing and spend the next two days reading my new book.

Eminent authors do, indeed, hate getting letters like that. To make Mr Updike’s happiness complete, many such requests end with a sheepish PS: Sorry to ask, but would it be possible to let me have your praise by next Thursday? My publisher — who, by the way, is your No 2 fan, next to me — says that’s the latest he can hold the presses. After

six books, I told my editor (who is now the publisher, president and chief executive of S&S): “No more blurbs for this camper.” He wasn’t thrilled, but good man that he is, he acceded. We have gone on to do 14 more books together, all of them blurbless, leaving Mr Updike and the other gods of Olympus in unmolested peace.

On the higher slopes of Mount Olympus, blurbs are a way by which the gods speak to one another in code, with the whole world watching. One of the delights of the late, great Spy magazine was its feature “Logrolling in Our Time,” which mortified many reciprocal blurbers and blurbees. To pick just one … oh, dear ….

My father, William F Buckley Jr., was capable of similar sleight of hand in blurbmanship. He and Arthur Schlesinger Jr were lifelong ideological opponents who frequently found themselves clashing on numerous public platforms. At one debate in the early 1960s, Mr Schlesinger said in his opening remarks, “Mr Buckley has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as a wit which I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate.” Rather nice, but a low-hanging fruit. Dear old Dad couldn’t resist. In his book “Cruising Speed” he recounted of Mr Schlesinger’s kind words.