All a blurb

Before warming to his argument, though, he paused to come over all hoity-toity about the poor saps who wander around bookshops "with little idea of what they want", having, despite the best efforts of freelance marketing consultants, forgotten the title of the book they came in for. Snapping punters out of their daze and forcing them to put their hands in their pockets requires, unarguably, the help of "the cover, the blurb, the reviews and the first page". Unaccountably, the blurb is left in the hands of editors, when as any fule no, "it should be firmly under the control of the marketing department".
Oh yes? No doubt Ian Norrie can tell me when the first blurb appeared, but it must be at least 100 years ago. Ever since, a bunch of driven, obsessive (and underpaid) people have taken responsibility for communicating the salient qualities of the books they love to a largely uncaring populace. Their efforts have been frequently ignored, granted, but would Harry Potter, for instance, have been any more successful if the blurb had been knocked out by the marketing department? Go back a bit, and ask the same question about Ian Fleming and James Bond--or The Great Gatsby, come to that. Perhaps Mr Norrie can also tell me when freelance marketing consultants were invented.
The fact is that the editor knows the book best, and is best qualified to blurb it. It’s the editor who briefs the marketing team, after all. Mr Horner invites us to regard the blurb as an advertisement, ipso facto best conjured up by ad men: "The best advertisements don’t just summarise a product’s features--they add a whole new layer of communication and engagement." So, I would submit, do the best blurbs. I rest my case . . .
. . . only to hoist it above my head again to salute the advent of yet another new HarperCollins imprint. Welcome, HarperPressFiction, a sister imprint to HarperPress. HarperPress, you see, publishes only books that are not fiction, and it would clearly be absurd to call it HarperPressNotFiction, wouldn’t it? So, instead of settling for publishing both fiction and non-fiction under the HarperPress imprint, they came up with the splendid wheeze of establishing an imprint that publishes only not not fiction, and HarperPressNotNotFiction would be even more absurd, no? Lots of HarperEntertainment all round! Oh, sorry, that’s yet another imprint.