There’s a lovely essay by Joseph Epstein titled “In and Around Books,” which playfully parses the dedications, acknowledgments, and blurbs that have evolved into an expected part of publishing. To which I would add: ads!
A couple years ago, the New York Times launched its Paper Cuts blog with a fabulous collection of book ads from 1962 to 1973. Here is the slide show. I’m particularly taken with the ad for The Bat-Poet, a children’s book written by Randall Jarrell and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, of which I had never heard, and the ad for Rex Reed’s Do You Sleep in the Nude?, featuring a dishy-looking Jacqueline Susann. I also can’t help noticing the big ads for books of poetry: big names like James Dickey and John Ashbery, sure, but when have I seen such big ads for poetry in my lifetime? Like any other ads, these provide a snapshot of various segments of our culture at the time, and they’re well worth a look.
I should add that the author of the post, Dwight Garner, peppered the blog with vintage book ads for as long as he was the one writing it, and just last month, he published Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements, an excerpt from which can be read here.
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