Curio Cabinet

Have you ever bought a book because of a quote from another author telling you to? Such endorsements, printed on the backs of books or on the inside of their dust jackets, are called blurbs, and one publisher is doing away with them. Simon & Schuster is one of the largest publishing houses in the U.S., and like every other publishing house, they’ve implicitly required their writers to solicit blurbs from other writers for their books. The common argument in favor of blurbs often is that they give potential buyers more confidence in their purchase, especially if the blurb is from an author they’re already familiar with. Others believe that bookstores and other large-scale buyers place a similar level of trust in the blurbs, which helps sales.
 
The practice of acquiring blurbs, however, can be very taxing. Writers, especially those with little name recognition, must ask more established writers to read and endorse their book. Writers’ agents devote much of their time to finding blurb-writers for their clients, and editors, too, have to run through their contacts list to reach out for blurbs. Then there’s the fact that blurbs aren’t always sincere. Many writers exchange blurbs as favors, though some end up writing many more than they ever receive. The amount of time it takes to read a book means that many writers don’t actually finish the entire thing before writing a blurb. Sean Manning, the current publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, considers blurbs a waste of time and believes that they don’t always reflect the artistic merit of the book. After all, many of the worlds’ greatest novels were published without blurbs, and books with blurb-covered jackets don’t always do well commercially or critically. Still, writers are divided. Some believe that blurbs are meaningless, but others believe they’re an important part of marketing. Only time will tell how blurbless books will do.

 
[Image description: A stack of books.] Credit & copyright: Poppy Thomas Hill, Pexels

Did Aphrodite smile on you this Valentine’s Day? As the most romantic weekend of the year draws to a close, it seems only right to learn a bit about Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Also known by her Roman name, Venus, Aphrodite is remembered today as a beautiful, romantic figure…yet she wasn’t actually the goddess of romantic love. Rather, her dominion was over physical desire and lust. This made her a surprisingly dangerous figure in Greek mythology, as she was a character driven by jealousy and prone to driving mortals mad. Even the story of her birth is surprisingly violent.
 
Like all Greek gods and goddesses, Aphrodite has two origins: the historical and mythical. The worship of Aphrodite might have been introduced to ancient Greece from the Middle East, and, indeed, there are similar figures in other pantheons of antiquity. Namely, she is considered to have many similarities to Ishtar of Mesopotamia and Hathor of ancient Egypt. Regardless of how she came to be introduced to the Greeks, her mythological origins are a little more fantastical, to say the least. Unlike most of the other Greek gods, Aphrodite wasn’t descended from the King of the gods, Zeus, nor any of his siblings. Instead, her birth came about as a result of divine patricide. When the titan Cronus overthrew his father, Uranus, he castrated him and threw his dismembered body into the sea. There, from the blood and foam of Uranus, Aphrodite was born. Due to the circumstances of her birth, she was strongly associated with water and was sometimes worshipped as a sea goddess.
 
Aphrodite was most commonly depicted as a goddess of beauty, fertility, sexuality, and, of course, love. But the Greeks strongly distinguished between erotic love and romantic love, and Aphrodite was the goddess of the former. Romantic love was seen in a positive light, while erotic love was seen as a sort of madness. With this in mind, Aphrodite’s temperament in mythology makes much more sense. She was frequently depicted as fickle, jealous, and short-tempered. In fact, despite being the goddess of love, she wasn’t particularly loyal to her own husband, Hephaestus. Various stories feature her affairs with Ares, Adonis, and other figures, often ending in humiliation or tragedy. She was also jealous when it came to her son, Eros, who shared his mother’s affinity for love and sexuality. When he fell in love with the mortal Psyche, Aphrodite conspired to break the couple apart by forcing Psyche to complete a set of seemingly impossible trials. Aphrodite’s meddling once resulted in the ruin of an entire kingdom. The goddess, along with Hera and Athena, forced Paris of Troy, a mortal man, to judge which of them to be the most beautiful. After Troy chose Aphrodite, she blessed him by having Eros strike Helen, one of the most beautiful mortal women in the world, with one of his enchanted arrows, making her fall in love with Paris. Unfortunately, Helen was already loved by Menelaus, the king of Sparta. After Paris and Helen eloped by returning to the former’s home, Menelaus rallied the rest of the Greeks to wage war against Troy. Following a 10-year conflict, Troy fell to the Greeks, resulting in Paris’s death.
 
Today, Aphrodite is often depicted as much more benevolent, which makes sense given the lessened distinction between erotic and romantic love, and a more positive view of sexuality. Depictions of Aphrodite also change with evolving beauty standards, reflecting the ideal female form at various points in history. Perhaps the most famous portrayal of the goddess is in the painting, The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, which takes inspiration from the story of her birth at sea. If you’ve never seen the painting, don’t worry; it’s much less graphic than the myth it’s based on!

 
[Image description: The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), a painting depicting Venus rising naked out of the ocean on a giant shell while flying winged figures blow wind toward her and woman on shore approaches with a blanket.] Credit & copyright: Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), Uffizi Gallery. Public Domain.