A blurb is a short summary accompanying a creative work. It may refer to the text on the back of a book but can also be seen on DVD and video cases, web portals and news websites. A blurb may introduce a newspaper or magazine feature story.
Contents |
The concept of a "brief statement praising a literary product" dates back to medieval literature of Egypt from the 14th century. The concept was known as taqriz in medieval Arabic literature.[1]
The word blurb originated in 1907. American humorist Gelett Burgess's short 1906 book Are you a bromide? was presented in a limited edition to an annual trade association dinner. The custom at such events was to have a dust jacket promoting the work and with, as Burgess' publisher B. W. Huebsch described it,
In this case the jacket proclaimed "YES, this is a 'BLURB'!" and the picture was of a (fictitious) young woman "Miss Belinda Blurb" shown calling out, described as "in the act of blurbing."
The name and term stuck for any publisher's contents on a book's back cover, even after the picture was dropped and only the complimentary text remained.
The blurb was developed simultaneously in Germany where it is regarded to have been invented by Karl Robert Langewiesche around 1902. In German bibliographic usage, it is usually located on the second page of the book underneath the Half title, or on the dust cover.
A blurb on a book or a film can be any combination of quotes from the work, the author, the publisher, reviewers or fans, a summary of the plot, a biography of the author or simply claims about the importance of the work. Many humorous books and films parody blurbs that deliver exaggerated praise by unlikely people and insults disguised as praise.
The Harvard Lampoon satire of The Lord of the Rings, entitled Bored of the Rings, deliberately used phony blurbs by deceased authors on the inside cover. One of the blurbs stated "One of the two or three books...", and nothing else.
In the 1980s, Spy Magazine ran a regular feature called "Logrolling in Our Time" which exposed writers who wrote blurbs for one anothers' books.[1]