on vanity solicitations

Publish a couple of books, and you inevitably start getting hounded by various “Who’s Who” publications. Those used to be completely legitimate five or six decades ago, and Whitehead during his conversations cites information from “Who’s Who” in almost reverential tones.

I think there may still be a legitimate version on the market, if I heard correctly, but most of them are now owned by shady vanity presses. (The name itself is not trademarked, and there are at least a half dozen operations hawking those volumes.)

In any case, I usually toss those things out immediately. But a couple of years ago one of them managed to sound slightly more legitimate, insofar as they were actually willing to call me in Egypt from New Jersey. I made the mistake of assuming that this indicated that they were a legitimate reference book, so I agreed to take the call at a given time. I was warned it would take 20 minutes, and it did. And at the end of the conversation the woman on the phone told me if I wanted this information to be included, it would cost a nominal fee, which if memory serves was around $175. It was such a ridiculous scam that I, who am normally unfailingly polite and warm to strangers, made a deliberately rude remark about her company.

But I’m just working up to the most ridiculous one of all, which one of my Cairo colleagues (the author of a SUNY Press book) also received. This was an offer to buy a medallion, suitable for wearing around the neck, stamped with one’s name and with the phrase “Great Thinker of the 21st Century,” or something along those lines. It was much too expensive to buy for the sake of campy fun– $400 or so.

And I was thinking, with computer and industrial technology at the stage they have now reached, these companies ought to be able to target their pitches a bit more. If they can scour through Amazon looking for authors of new books who might think they are great thinkers of the 21st century, they ought to be able to scour through the blogosphere and target bloggers with silken banners, for a more reasonable price, that say “Speculative Realism,” or “Radical Orthodoxy,” or “Phenomenology,” or “Non-Mentalist Anti-Realist Verificationism.” All it would take is one sharp graduate student on staff, somewhat hip to current intellectual trends, and a more reasonable pricing structure.