Oneworld £14.99
‘Work out what you want to say before you say it,’ writes the wise and witty Louise Willder.
So, using this advice, I state immediately that this is a book to be valued. It is not boring. Yet its subject – it purports to be about blurbs, book blurbs, the copy you read on the back, and sometimes the front or flaps of every book you buy – is boring.
What could be? Or pondering on buying a book and being presented with such cover copy as ‘Back in Paris for a quiet, sane fortnight, Sasha Jansen has just been rescued by a friend from drinking herself to death in a Bloomsbury bedsitter’ (to capture Jean Rhys being mournful again, of course, in [1939]).
