This article is taken from the August-September 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Like many other professions, the book trade is keen on jargon: lots of it, the more the merrier. As with those other professions, it tends to be of two kinds: outward-facing, when publishers communicate with their customers; and inward-facing, when they communicate with other publishers or the people who write the products they sell. 

Its function — the function of all professional jargon, it might be said — is simultaneously to create an easily intelligible code for the benefit of insiders and (frankly) to mystify and impress those beyond the loop.

Publishers’ outward-facing jargon can be conveniently observed in the blurbs printed on book jackets. These are full of code words which, you may be surprised to learn, usually have very little to do with the contents. 

A good place to start in any consideration of jacket copy might be the late Anthony Blond’s still invaluable The Publishing Game (1971), in which the one-time kingpin of Anthony Blond Ltd  and various successor firms identifies the real meaning of several of the key publishers’ cliches of the late 1960s.

They include Kafkaesque (“obscure”), Saga (“the editor suggested cuts but the author was adamant”), Frank or outspoken (“obscene”) and Well-known, meaning “unknown”. To these may be added Rebellious (“the author uses bad language”), Savage (“the author revels in sadism”), Ingenious (“usually means unbelievable”) and Sensitive (“homosexual”). Blond also offers a list of OK writers (Kafka, J.D. Salinger) with whom promising newcomers may profitably be compared.

Naturally, Blond’s list is of its time: nobody these days would think of labelling a gay coming-of-age novel “sensitive”. On the other hand, if the content has been superannuated, here in 2023 very little has changed in the form — which is to say that the modern book blurb is still awash with genteel euphemism and downright obfuscation. 

Sometimes a blurb-adjective means its exact opposite. Thus powerful can invariably be construed as “weak”, whilst audacious or bold generally means “deeply conventional”. Shocking, obviously, means “not shocking” and challenging “not at all challenging”.

Then there are the contemporary buzzwords: transgressive, used to describe anything even a degree or two north of the sexual or ideological status quo; or immersive, which is another way of saying “reasonably engrossing”. 

Slightly less easy to decode, perhaps, are the adjectives in which exasperated publishers can be seen quietly signalling in the direction of their authors. Thus experimental can usually be translated as “unreadable”, and long-meditated (as in some abstruse piece of quasi-philosophical enquiry) “this took so long that, frankly, we’d forgotten all about it”. A writer who has gone off in an exciting new direction has invariably made a terrible mistake.

This is a polite way of suggesting the author is about to commit career suicide

Finally, there is the question of how the author shall be described. To go back to Blond’s list, well-known for “unknown” is still going strong. In terms of authorial status it is usually safe to assume the exact opposite of what is being publicly proclaimed. 

One of Britain’s most highly esteemed authors, for example, means “had some small reputation 20 years ago”, whilst one of our most promising younger writers can conveniently be attached to anyone under the age of 50 who has gone so far as to write a book. Further down the market a much-loved storyteller means “has been rambling on like this for decades”.

If this is how publishers address the marketplace, then how, it might be wondered, do they speak to their hired hands? Here it might be argued that a preternatural inability to speak the truth is made worse by the sensitivity of the egos involved. 

Thus, of some newly-delivered manuscript, needs work usually means “this is terrible”, and we thought this was quite an original treatment “hopelessly banal”, whilst for an editor to remark that this wasn’t quite what we expected — often to some well-respected writer of domestic dramas who has submitted a novel about little green men arriving from alien planets — is a polite way of suggesting the author is about to commit career suicide.

There is, alas, no way of getting round these serial exercises in wool-pulling. Books, like soap powder and patent medicines, need to be sold. If anyone were to tell the exact truth about many of the items piled up in bookshops, sales would plummet overnight. 

Let us imagine that some grand old man of English letters is about to publish a new novel — the seventeenth, say, in a distinguished career going back to 1975. A truthful account of the contents would doubtless run: 

Here is Jolyon Golightly’s new novel. It is remarkably like the last few, if rather shorter, and its view of contemporary Britain is inevitably somewhat out of date. Mr Golightly is a game old boy, though, who has no intention of laying down his pen any time soon, and those of you who liked his last one will probably like this, too. 

Needless to say, any blurb-writer who actually filed this copy would be sacked on the spot.