Trick that will make you buy a book

LIkE all self-respecting book nuts, I have long admired a good blurb, the hundred or so words on the back of a paperback that will make you either (i) buy it or (ii) cast it away into outer darkness for ever.

Who’s writing these things? Well, I’ll let you into a secret: for my own books, it’s usually me! Louise Willder, who has been writing the blurbs of others’ for 25 years, would not approve. She thinks it’s a job for the professionals. Authors writing their own blurbs, she says, tend to ramble on, or miss the point and fail in the blurb’s primary function: to sell the book. I’m sure I have done all three, which would probably explain why my sales have been so low recently . . .

But Willder, a funny, inventive writer in her own right, has produced a little marvel here. She calls it ‘the outside story of books’.

She is talking about blurbs and titles (Catch-22 had the working title Catch-21), and she also investigates feuds between authors, writing tricks, plot spoilers and the difficulty of reading classic literature, which has long been a bugbear of mine.

Some classic literature — Pride And Prejudice

springs to mind, as does Jane Eyre — is almost compulsively readable, but have you tried Moby-Dick? The opposite of unputdownable: unpickupable, if you prefer.

T. S. Eliot, who worked for Faber and Faber for many years, wrote thousands of blurbs, so many as to make it quite impossible that he should have time or energy to write anything else, remarked a colleague. Some of Eliot’s blurbs were . . . shall we say, odd?

Of Louis MacNeice’s early collection Poems ( 1935), he wrote, ‘ His work is intelligible but unpopular and has the pride and modesty of things that endure.’ As Willder says, her career might not have endured if she had been that honest.

She approvingly quotes a list from the Times Literary Supplement of phrases book reviewers should never use. They include ‘ mordant wit’, ‘ rich tapestry’, ‘ consummate’, ‘ writes like an angel’, ‘peppered with’, ‘couldn’t put it down’ and ‘reminds one of Martin Amis’. I’m saying nothing.

And concision, you must remember, is everything. There are no words in the language Willder dislikes more than ‘Continued on back flap’.

Sophie Hannah has described this as ‘ a must-read for every book-obsessed person’ and she’s right. I’m tempted to say that Willder writes like an angel and has a mordant wit, but I shan’t. It’s consummately brilliant, though. Bite on that!