Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs, Writing Tips, Literary Folklore and Publishing Secrets

one of Pearson’s favourite book covers, the 1969 design for Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words, which foregrounds the quotation ‘I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it.’

‘The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.’

the oldest known printed advert in English is from the fifteenth century – and is for a book.

The best Hollywood pitches embody this idea of pairings or contrasts. Among my roll-call of honour would be I Am Legend: ‘The last man on earth is not alone’; The Social Network: ‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies’; and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: ‘One man’s struggle to take it easy.’

As Jonathan Gottschall says in The Storytelling Animal, ‘We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.’

You could argue, quite correctly, that in all of these examples, whether commercial or literary, the ellipsis is completely unnecessary – and you would be right. These sentences would stand alone well enough without them. But, as Stephen Fry says of swearing being criticised as ‘unnecessary’: ‘It’s not necessary to have coloured socks. It’s not nec

In an age when paper was expensive, they were often recycled, hence their nickname ‘bum fodder’. For further toilet-related fun, the word ‘bumf’, or ‘bumph’, is a shortened version of this.

‘There had been many years of his life when he was a tall, good-looking man, no gut, strolling about the campus at Harvard, and people did look at him then, for all those years, he would see students glance at him with deference, and also women, they looked at him.’

I try to follow the ‘minimal adjectives’ advice as much as I can when writing blurbs. When I recently had to introduce the heroine of a coming-of-age novel called The Island, I decided it would be better to say she had been thrown out of a convent for kicking the prioress, rather than describing her as ‘spirited’ or ‘rebellious’.