Word: blurb
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...fail to see why anybody ever rejects an occasional god-send from the publishers. In this case, the blurb writer has served up an excellent description of the story which errs only slightly on the side of hyperbole. discount the implication of the first of the following sentences and you may accept every statement at its face value...
...down in the last century and consigned to comparative obscurity, but its complete realism might tag it as written yesterday. Haldane Macfall wrote of Negro life in all its comic fullness, yet refused to write the regulation Negro comic story. Saith Carl Van Vechten, according to the blurb: "The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer is probably the best novel yet written about the Negro." And Critic Van Vechten is not far wrong, for Haldane Macfall can write. He has an extraordinarily observant eye and an equally effective pen. He has the turn of the epigrammatist, but makes no ostentatious display...
French ingenuity has managed, in the past to sweeten alluringly the uses of advertisement. Managers of theatres once obtained publicity by purchasing the services of some penurious gentleman, shaving his head, and seating him, haughtily tailored, in some famed cabaret, with a blurb for the show tattooed upon his naked poll. Last week a bouillon company evolved a sleight even more alarming. An army of ragged sandwich men was sent into the streets, armed with bundles of red feathers upon which the name of the product was printed in black. Each feather had a hook. The sandwich men hooked them...
Came the publishers of Liberty, for example, "playing up" articles about Woodrow Wilson by Editor William Allen White of Kansas. Said the newspaper blurb: "That Whispering About Woodrow Wilson's Love Affairs," etc. Juxtaposed with the eminently responsible name of the editor of the Emporia Gazette, this blurb was irresistible. Yet in Editor White's article, "that whispering about Woodrow Wilson's love affairs" constituted an entirely secondary element of interest, and reference to it occupied scarcely an eighth of the article. Friends of Editor White were irritated to think that the publishers of Liberty had thus misrepresented him, since...
What interested them more, however, was the statement that The Woman's Home Companion was publishing serially a new book about Jesus, written by "a business man" who had had certain vivid spiritual experiences. "A business man," said the blurb, and curiosity was at once aroused. A new man, evidently; someone unknown. Possibly he had a new point of view. This sounded fresh and worth looking into...