Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

A blurb is a short endorsement written on the jacket of a book: "absolutely goose-pimpling! This is horror writing at its finest!!" or, "a masterfully rendered saga of Britain's colonial expansion!!!". Everyone knows blurbs are essential components in book marketing, but how many know the story behind the origin of this strange little term?

This word was invented by a 20th century American humorist, Gelette Burgess. The author of several popular books at the time, Burgess was a guest of honor at the 1907 American Booksellers Association annual dinner, where he gave away copies of his most recent publication.

He waggishly devised a self-promoting jacket for his own book. Mocking the advertising style of the era, he adorned the front of his volume with the portrait of what he called a "sickly sweet young woman," the kind regularly featured on boxes of dental preparations and medicinal elixirs. Burgess dubbed his model "Miss Belinda Blurb" and next to her "sickly sweet" visage, the author inserted several self-congratulatory comments about his book.

Burgess thereafter referred to all pithy book endorsements as "blurbs". The word must have filled a linguistic vacuum, for within a short twenty years of its coinage, it had found a permanent place in the American English vocabulary.

Radio Script > Blurb