Do you hate book cover blurbs? You’re in good company.

In The Look of the Book, authors Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth tell us, “[The] antiblurb sentiment stretches all the way back to the inventor of the term, Gelett Burgess, who created a book jacket in 1907—featuring ‘Miss Melinda Blurb in the Act of Blurbing’—to mock a convention that was becoming more widespread in publishing.”

Burgess coined the term, but to whom do we owe the practice behind “the most repugnant word in the English language,” according to Jhumpa Lahiri? Why, Walt Whitman.

“After reading the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), Ralph Waldo Emerson sent the poet a letter of praise … [that] was meant to be a private word of encouragement. Whitman had it published in the New York Tribune. And one year later, in 1856, he had one line of the letter—‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career’—stamped in gold leaf on the spine of the book’s second edition.”

“I celebrate myself,” indeed.

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Related reading: “Blurb No More” by Rebecca Makkai