How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History of History by Marshall T. Poe

Author:Marshall T. Poe [Poe, Marshall T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Writing, Politics, Historiography, Non-Fiction, Education
ISBN: 9781780997292
Amazon: 1780997299
Goodreads: 37814679
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2018-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

If the author lives in a famous hotbed of intellectual activity, this factoid will always be mentioned. Elizabeth lives in Ameless, Iowana, which is not such a place. But if she lived in Priestly, then her biography would have to end, “She lives in Priestley, Westcostia.” The rhetorical coup de grace of this type is the ever-enviable “splits her time between place-that-means-you’re-smart X and place-that-means-you’re-smart Y.” Though Elizabeth thinks Ameless is fine, she wouldn’t mind “splitting her time” between Priestley and Oxturd. If she did, then she would write just that at the end of her bio and be proud as a peacock. Below the bio you’ll often run into credits for the jacket: who designed it, where the images came from, etc. Like photographers, these folks only merit the finest of print.

On the back of the jacket the publicists continue their campaign to get you to buy the book by providing effusive endorsements—sometimes also called “blurbs”—by people they hope you’ve heard of. Before a book is issued, publicists send advanced copies to these people in the hopes that they will blurb the book, that is, provide some copy that can be used as an endorsement on the jacket. In the best case, famous people will write the endorsements, because everyone knows famous people know what they’re talking about. Alas, publicists can rarely convince famous people to endorse history books because most famous people don’t read history books. So in most cases, the publicists tap well-known popular history authors or academics who have achieved a certain standing among history buffs. How does the publicist find these people? They ask the authors. Who do the authors choose? People they know will write nice things about them. And who are those people? The authors’ patrons, clients, and friends. Naturally they write things like, “This is the greatest book ever written.” For example, Elizabeth’s advisor blurbed her book and, not surprisingly, she thought it was a “path-breaking contribution to our understanding of post-war American history” that she “could not put down.” Having friends write endorsements for each other’s books may seem to invite a conflict of interest. It does. But more to the point it creates a confluence of interests of the you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours variety. It works like this: I’ll write a good blurb for your book and, when my book comes out, you can write a good blurb for mine. This kind of reciprocation is known in the trade as “log rolling,” and one finds a lot of it on the back of history book jackets.

At the bottom of the jacket’s back cover, you will see a number of things all having to do with the sale of the book. The first is a barcode that identifies the book for the purposes of inventory, sale, and library cataloging. Then there is the “International Standard Book Number” or “ISBN” as it’s universally known. Every modern book has an ISBN. It uniquely identifies the book among the entire universe of books with ISBNs and, like the barcode, helps those who publish, sell, and catalogue books keep track of them.

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