How to judge a book by its cover
I T is a truth universally to be wept over with hot tears that there are way, way too many books. We are speeding toward a tipping point: soon the mass of all the piles of books that we keep everywhere will exceed that of the Earth, and, following the inexorable laws of physics, we will be crushed by their gravitational force and collapse into a black hole, at whose centre we will find Stephen Hawking reading A Brief History of Time aloud.
To save the planet, we must reduce publishing emissions — and it starts with you, good reader. It’s time to judge books by their covers. We’ll send those that don’t pass muster to Edward Scissorhands. To determine which ones, I’ve invented a handy test:
Step 1: Ignore the actual front cover, which, cunningly, might be gorgeous and so induce you into the dreamy mania that causes you to suspend good judgment and walk around with ever-higher armfuls of books.
Step 2: Raise the book’s spine to eye level and check for a certain word in its title.
Step 3: Done! If the word is there, imagine that you’re holding an electric eel instead of a book and behave accordingly.
Hide your eyes — I’m about to name the word — yes, it’s that word — the execrable “journey”.
Attention writers: “journey” is not a real word
Just as there are words that professionals should be flogged for uttering — “practitioner”, for example, or “presents”, in the medical sense, as in, “if the patient presents with rabies, run” — so there are words that should send writers and publishers to the rack. This one has achieved plague status.
Attention writers: “journey” is not a real word, it’s more like a word-fart. You fart it out of your brain when you want to make something sound more significant than it really is. Since your brain has become a cantaloupe — a farting cantaloupe — you use “journey”. Clearly, you have not yet observed that everything is on a journey, all the time, including your cat ( Smudgey’s Journey to the Balcony), the mouse it ate
( Crunch: My Untimely Journey) and its litter tray ( Not Quite a Zen Garden: Journeys of Faith and Bleach), and that to use a wordfart in the very part of your book that makes the first impression — the title — is pure soggy flatulence.
Another word-fart is “intriguing”, which is devoid of meaning yet often found lurking within book blurbs and shout quotes. Readers: spot it on the cover and you’re within your rights to send its host for recycling.
As a column practitioner who occasionally presents with a case of righteous indignation, I’m in no mood to compromise on this. Send me an offending book — such as The Intriguing Journey of My Farting-canteloupe Brain — and it will be used in the editorial passageway for sixand-out cricket. Full tosses only. To save the planet. • Ben Williams is the books editor. Send him your most-loathed #wordfart on Twitter.
Link love: Coffitivity
The grand literary cafés of the world — such as Hemingway frequented — are about to be disrupted by www.coffitivity.com , which streams the sounds of people chattering, plates and cutlery clattering and coffee grinders, well, grinding, direct to your desktop. According to research, ambient coffee house noise boosts productivity. Now, it’s a moveable feast.