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Blurb
A blurb is a short promotional piece accompanying a piece of creative work. It may be written by the author or publisher or quote praise from others. Blurbs were originally printed on the back or rear dust jacket of a book. With the development of the mass-market paperback, they were placed on both covers by most publishers. Now they are also found on web portals and news websites. A blurb may introduce a newspaper or a book. History In the US, the history of the blurb is said to begin with Walt Whitman's collection, ''Leaves of Grass''. In response to the publication of the first edition in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson sent Whitman a congratulatory letter, including the phrase "I greet you at the beginning of a great career": the following year, Whitman had these words stamped in gold leaf on the spine of the second edition. The word ''blurb'' was coined in 1906 by American humorist Gelett Burgess (1866–1951). The October 1906 first edition of his short book ''Are You a Bro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gelett Burgess
Frank Gelett Burgess (January 30, 1866 – September 18, 1951) was an American artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. He was an important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, ''The Lark'', and association with ''The Crowd (literary group), The Crowd'' literary group. He is best known as a writer of nonsense verse, such as "Purple Cow, The Purple Cow", and for introducing French modern art to the United States in an essay titled "The Wild Men of Paris." He was the illustrator of the Goops murals, in Coppa's restaurant, in the Montgomery Block and author of the popular Goops books. Burgess coined the term "blurb." Early life Born in Boston, Burgess was "raised among staid, conservative New England gentry". He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with a B.S. in 1887. After graduation, Burgess fled conservative Boston for the livelier Bohemianism, bohemia of Sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fallacy Of Quoting Out Of Context
Quoting out of context (sometimes referred to as contextomy or quote mining) is an informal fallacy in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. Context may be omitted intentionally or accidentally, thinking it to be non-essential. As a fallacy, quoting out of context differs from false attribution, in that the out of context quote is still attributed to the correct source. Arguments based on this fallacy typically take two forms: #As a straw man argument, it involves quoting an opponent out of context in order to misrepresent their position (typically to make it seem more simplistic or extreme) in order to make it easier to refute. It is common in politics. #As an appeal to authority, it involves quoting an authority on the subject out of context, in order to misrepresent that authority as supporting some position. Contextomy Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic cont ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart ( ; born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart on July 5, 1972)' is a Soviet-born American writer. He is the author of five novels (including ''Absurdistan'' and '' Super Sad True Love Story'') and a memoir. Much of his work is satirical. Early life Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart () was born in the Soviet Union, and he spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in Leningrad, present-day St. Petersburg—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg". He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, and describes his family as "typically Soviet". His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist. When he was five, he wrote a 100-page comic novel. Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up in Queens, New York, with no television in the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dust Jacket
The dust jacket (sometimes book jacket, dust wrapper or dust cover) of a book is the detachable outer cover, usually made of paper and printed with text and illustrations. This outer cover has folded flaps that hold it to the front and back book covers; these flaps may also double as bookmarks. Dust jackets originally displayed cover information on top of a simple binding, at a time when it was not feasible to print directly onto the binding. The role of a dust jacket has been largely supplanted by modern hardcover printing technologies, which print such information directly onto the binding. Modern dust covers still serve to display promotional material and shield the book from damage. The back panel or flaps of the dust cover are printed with Biography, biographical information about the author, a summary of the book from the publisher (known as a blurb) or critical praise from Celebrity, celebrities or authorities in the book's subject area. The back of a dust jacket often has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leaves Of Grass
''Leaves of Grass'' is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. After self-publishing it in 1855, he spent most of his professional life writing, revising, and expanding the collection until his death in 1892. Either six or nine separate editions of the book were produced, depending on how one defines a new edition. The continual modifications to ''Leaves of Grass'' resulted in vastly different copies of it circulating in Whitman's lifetime. The first edition was a slim tract of twelve poems, and the last was a compilation of over 400 poems. The book represents a celebration of Whitman's philosophy of life and humanity in which he praises nature and the individual's role in it. He catalogues the expansiveness of American democracy. Rather than dwell on religious or spiritual themes, he focuses primarily on the body and the material world. With very few exceptions, Whitman's poems do not rhyme or follow conventional rules for meter and line length. ''Leaves of Grass'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman Jr. (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist; he also wrote two novels. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature and world literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and literary realism, realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection ''Leaves of Grass'', which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality. Whitman was born in Huntington, New York, Huntington on Long Island and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At age 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, ''Leaves of Grass'', first published in 1855, was financed with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt to reach out to the common person with an American epi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logrolling
Logrolling is the trading of favors, or '' quid pro quo'', such as vote trading by legislative members to obtain passage of actions of interest to each legislative member. In organizational analysis, it refers to a practice in which different organizations promote each other's agendas, each in the expectation that the other will reciprocate. In an academic context, the '' Nuttall Encyclopedia'' describes logrolling as "mutual praise by authors of each other's work". Where intricate tactics or strategy are involved, the process may be called horse trading. Concept and origin There are three types of logrolling: * Logrolling in direct democracies: a few individuals vote openly, and votes are easy to trade, rearrange, and observe. Direct democracy is pervasive in representative assemblies and small-government units * Implicit logrolling: large bodies of voters decide complex issues and trade votes without a formal vote trade (Buchanan and Tullock 1962) * Distributive logrol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Bialik
Carl Bialik is an American journalist and YouGov America's vice president of data science and U.S. politics editor. Earlier, Bialik was known for his work for ''The Wall Street Journal''. In 2013, Bialik was hired by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com. In 2017 he was named data science editor of Yelp, working on Yelpblog. Career At the Wall Street Journal, Bialik was the creator and writer of the weekly ''Numbers Guy'' column, about the use and (particularly) misuse of numbers and statistics in the news and advocacy. It launched in 2005. He was also the co-writer on the Journal's blog-like ''Daily Fix'' column, which billed itself as "a daily look at the best sportswriting on the Web." His regular column at Gelf, which skewed toward a meta-journalism focus, was ''Blurb Racket'', which pulled back the curtains on the critic quotes in movie and book advertisements, mainly by comparing them directly with the reviews they come from. He is also the host of the tennis podcast "Thirt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Book Terminology
A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium. Originally physical, electronic books and audiobooks are now existent. Physical books are objects that contain printed material, mostly of writing and images. Modern books are typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover, what is known as the ''codex'' format; older formats include the scroll and the tablet. As a conceptual object, a ''book'' often refers to a written work of substantial length by one or more authors, which may also be distributed digitally as an electronic book (ebook). These kinds of works can be broadly classified into fiction (containing invented content, often narratives) and non-fiction (containing content intended as factual truth). But a physical book may not contain a written work: for example, it may contain ''only'' drawings, engravings, photographs, sheet music, puzzles, or removable content like paper d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Book Design
Book design is the graphic art of determining the visual and physical characteristics of a book. The design process begins after an author and editor finalize the manuscript, at which point it is passed to the production stage. During production, graphic artists, art directors, or professionals in similar roles will work with printing press operators to decide on visual elements—including typography, margins, illustrations, and page layout—and physical features, such as trim size, type of paper, kind of printing, binding. From the late Middle Ages to the 21st century, the basic structure and organization of Western books have remained largely unchanged. Front matter introduces readers to the book, offering practical information like the title, author and publisher details, and an overview of the content. It may also include editorial or authorial notes providing context. This is followed by the main content of the book, often broadly organized into chapters or secti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Book Publishing
Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, comic books, newspapers, and magazines to the public. With the advent of digital information systems, the scope has expanded to include digital publishing such as e-books, digital magazines, websites, social media, music, and video game publishing. The commercial publishing industry ranges from large multinational conglomerates such as News Corp, Pearson, Penguin Random House, and Thomson Reuters to major retail brands and thousands of small independent publishers. It has various divisions such as trade/retail publishing of fiction and non-fiction, educational publishing, and academic and scientific publishing. Publishing is also undertaken by governments, civil society, and private companies ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
