Written Pyramids

Paper Cuts, the blog of the New York Times' Book Review staff, had a slide show up a couple of weeks ago that featured some of the fun things promoting books that publishers mail to them in hoped of getting a book reviewed. These things range from Trojan horses to ties to tennis balls. Throughout the amusing slide show, the writers stress that there are rules about accepting the gifts, and that the gifts do not influence their reviewing decision. Sometimes, they don't even know what the gift was supposed to promote.

But you know what they don't do? They don't take a press release from one book and attribute it to another. Because, that's the only way I can imagine this mistake showed up in The Guardian.

"James Harding's book Alpha Dogs is not a searing, gripping novel as we said in a diary item, page 31, June 26. It is a work of nonfiction about a firm of US political strategists."

Oops. By the way, the full name of the book is Alpha Dogs: The Americans who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business. Sounds like a searing, gripping novel to me,