The great publisher Carmen Callil, founder of Virago, has died at 84. In her last review for The Oldie, published this autumn, she wrote about the art of publishing
BLURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: An A-Z of Literary Enthusiasm
By Louise Willder
One World
Review by Carmen Callil
“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 can be worse than trying to condense into a hundred or so words the mysteries of, say, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Or pondering on buying a book and being presented with cover copy such 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” (Jean Rhys being mournful again, of course, in Good Morning, Midnight [1939]).
Encapsulating the sense, value, singularity and appeal of every book is the job of a book copywriter. That, and obedience to the marketing, sales and global money bosses hovering above every editor and blurb writer in the business today, urging them towards words which will sell, sell, sell. Louise Willder has been writing such blurbs, over 5,000 of them, for over 25 years, for Penguin Books.
She should be a jaded creature, but instead she is full of vim, blessed too with an unusual sense of enquiry, a comic turn of phrase, and a talent for investigation into almost every nook and cranny of the business and pleasures of books. She uses these talents to range well away from blurbs and marketing into the world of literature, great and popular, and the craft of publishing generally.
For Blurb Your Enthusiasm - a terrible title for this delicious book - is actually about loving, reading, selling and working for books. And, for books here, I could have well written ‘working for writers’ – thus making this an essential handbook for any young human being (or old, if they are given the opportunity, though that is most unlikely) who aspires to a life in book publishing.
Willder is formidably well-read, with an exceptionally good and beady eye for quotation and literary gossip. She covers almost everything: adjectives, puns, the importance of book titles, straplines, puns, hacking golden words out of foul book reviews, pondering on clichés are only a few of the joys of this book. There are writing tips, analyses of dedications, typefaces, chapbooks, pamphlets, dots, dashes and ellipses.
She has heroes and heroines: Dickens, Roberto Calasso (an Italian publisher famous in my day, unknown now), Kate Atkinson, Muriel Spark and Sue Townsend. She is very partial to George Orwell. One quote she chooses: “England is ‘a family with the wrong members in control’” being particularly useful these past months. She is sound on not cancelling authors for being disagreeable, fascist, or politically incorrect, and acute as to how Brexit triumphed, and Trump came to power by using simple words.
Another good thing about this book is that, as it goes on, it gets better, with excellent chapters on children’s books, genre fiction, Enid Blyton, Shirley Conran, Nabokov and Lolita – the ultimate text for a good copy writer. Her choice of the “greatest line in the history of the written word is the strapline for Shirley Conran’s Lace: ‘Which of your bitches is my mother?’” Working in publishing, she hedges her bets, adding “probably” before that choice.
Warning: this is a book with flaws, thank goodness, and one of them is the repetition of the publications, blurbs, lifestyle et al of that global giant of paperback publishing for which she works. Not that Willder ignores other imprints – all of blurb and book life is here – but my comment of ‘Not again’ pops up a little too much, as Penguin paperbacks stalk her pages.
She can overstretch her language and her jokes - ‘Let me channel my inner Mary Beard” is only one tedious example; is prone to using words like ‘upcoming’ and sometimes given to unfortunate and often embarrassing asides in caps. “PLEASE GOD, NO! I have a mortgage!” is only one example. She uses far too many exclamation marks (publishers of my generation were taught to avoid them at all costs).
Such imperfections match her subject, publishing being an imperfect trade as every writer knows. These tiny peccadillos could well be cut in a reprint, of which I imagine there will be many.
