Patterns of puffery:

Blaise Cronin is the Rudy Professor of Infor-

mation Science at Indiana University, where
he has been Dean of the School of Library and
Information Science for 13 years.

Kathryn La Barre is a doctoral student in

an analysis of non-fiction blurbs
information science at Indiana University.
BLAISE CRONIN and KATHRYN LA BARRE

The blurb is a paratextual element which has not previously been subjected
to systematic analysis. We describe the nature and purpose of this publish-
ing epiphenomenon, highlight some of the related marketing issues and
ethical concerns and provide a statistical analysis of almost 2000 blurbs
identified in a sample of 450 non-fiction books.

PARATEXTUAL STUDIES
Beginning in recent years, literary scholars and cultural historians (e.g.
Cayuela, 1996) have systematically studied various forms of paratext,
Genettes (1997a: 3) term for any of the bibliographic elements that have a
connection to, but are not part of, the body proper of the text: a title, subtitle,
intertitles; prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords, etc.; marginal, infrapaginal,
terminal notes; epigraphs; illustrations; blurbs, book covers, dust jackets, and
many other kinds of secondary signals, whether allographic or autographic.
Examples of studies exploring some of these accompanying productions
(Genette, 1997b: 1) include: monographic histories of the footnote by Grafton
(1997) and Zerby (2002); Cronins (1995, 1984) exegeses of citations and
acknowledgments; Hyland and Tses (2004) linguistic analysis of dissertation
acknowledgements; Giffords (1988) review of book dedications; OConnor
and OConnors (1998) deconstruction of the book-jacket as a document access
mechanism; Mackeys (2001) consideration of spin-off text linked to novels for
young people.
The blurb has also received critical attention, and was one of the para-
textual elements considered in Jacksons (2000) book, Invisible Forms: A Guide
to Literary Curiosities. Douglas (2001) has explored the relationship between
blurbs and theories of authorship and autobiography. In an early essay on the
subject, Davis (1994) identified the blurb as a place where contemporary dis-
courses of the book are in evidence . . . a recent mercantile site that evinces
knowledges potential for commodification. Blurbs, one might say, instantiate
the interplay of literary and commercial ambition in the field of cultural pro-
duction (Bourdieu, 1993: 40).

BLURBS
Blurbs advance praise, to use the American expression are designed to
Address: School of Library and stimulate book sales. Simply put, one authors for it is often, though not
Information Science always, a mutuality of authors reputation is used to launch or augment
10th Street and Jordan Avenue anothers. Sometimes the authors are reputational equals; sometimes the
Indiana University relationship is asymmetrical, as when a celebrity author allows a novice to
Bloomington, IN 47405 3907 draw on his or her reputational stock. Little, however, is to be gained by having
USA a virtually unknown author praise an Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Tom Clancy or
Tel: +1 (812) 855 2848 Noam Chomsky. The business of blurbs can be viewed as a primitive instance
E-mail: bcronin@indiana.edu of a recommender system. In the emerging Reputation Society (Masum and
Zhang, 2004), the trustworthiness of a distributed reputation system (whether

JLS
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(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 37 (1): 1724
[DOI: 10.1177/0961000605052156]

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Patterns of puffery: an analysis of non-fiction blurbs
an author citation network or an online auction such as
eBay) will depend on the credibility of the social actors
and the reliability of the system of which they are part.
As we shall see, the integrity of the publishing industrys
reputation-based system for producing blurbs has been
repeatedly called into question.
The word blurb was coined almost 100 years ago
by the American humorist Gelett Burgess. In Burgess
Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always
Needed, he defined it as a flamboyant advertisemen; an
inspired testimonial (Burgess, 1914: 7). Today no self-
respecting book cover or dust jacket is complete without
one or more blurbs. Puffery and commercial publishing
have become inseparable, whether we are talking about
fiction or non-fiction, trade or academic markets. Indeed,
a new lexicon has emerged to capture this publishing
epiphenomenon: there are blurbers (aka blurbists, or
in special cases, blurb-meisters) who blurb for
blurbees. A blurber may be said to lend his blurb,
which then appears in blurb space. And so on (Almond,
2003; Fischer, 2004).
ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
The art and ethics of blurbing have attracted much
attention. Blurbs 101 in the New Yorker is a good place to
start for an amiable and informative introduction to the
subject (Jackson, 2003). Blurbs may be marginal text, but
the writing of blurbs is a serious and time-consuming
business, a form of boosterism that has by some accounts
spiralled out of control in a publishing market suffering
from over-capacity. Some authors dutifully read and
legitimately praise the works for which they supply
blurbs. However, it is well known that others are not
above granting endorsements for books they have not
read (Foggo, 2004), raising questions about the ethicality
of the practice. Similar concerns, as it happens, have been
raised about authors citation behaviours (Simkin and
Roychowdhury, 2003). Moreover, some authors see
blurbing as a drain on their own creative energies, one for
which they receive no remuneration. For others, estab-
lished authors in particular, there is an element of noblesse
oblige in crafting blurbs: unpaid labor on the strength of
a moral obligation to help fellow scribblers, as Proulx put
it (2003).
The lightweight subject of blurbs has attracted the
attention of the heavyweight Wall Street Journal. With
150,000 new book titles published in 2002, it is hardly
surprising that a juicy blurb is considered essential for a
fledgling author (Trachtenberg, 2003: A1). A blurb from
Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag or Stephen Hawking may
well help an aspiring author stand out in a hype
economy (goodreports.net, 2002), though the Economist
(1995) remains sceptical on the issue. (We have not come
across any published research exploring the relationship
between blurbs and a consumers propensity to
18 JOURNAL OF LIBRARIANSHIP AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, 37 (1) MARCH 2005
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purchase.) By the same token, if a serial blurber (Truitt,
2001) is too liberal with his encomia, Greshams Law
kicks in: a surfeit of hyperbole-rich blurbs may cause
potential customers to dismiss genuine praise along with
shallow puffery.
Camille Paglia (1996: 29) has used the pages of Pub-
lishers Weekly to decry a corrupt practice driven by
shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole. She has a
clause in her own book contracts forbidding the use of
blurbs; excerpts from book reviews, on the other hand,
are permissible. By way of an aside, it would be reveal-
ing to compare the tone of book blurbs in general with
subsequent, published reviews. Paglias concerns about
the potential for conflicts of interest in the blurb milieu
are shared by others: Edleman (n.d.) wonders if blurbers
could, practicably, be required to disclose relationships
(with fellow authors, editors, agents, publishers) which
might constitute a material conflict of interest. Fialkoff
(2004) is only one of many to have commented on the
practice of log-rolling, where authors represented by
the same agent or publisher often write promotional
blurbs for each other. This you-scratch-my-back-and-
Ill-scratch-yours phenomenon was entertainingly
exposed in the pages of Spy Magazine during the late
1980s and early 90s. The magazines Logrolling in our
Time column showcased authors who traded reviews;
for example (Kaplan, 1991: 36): A triumph of style
Paul Theroux on Nadine Gordimers The Conservationist;
His is a large, outrageous talent Gordimer on
Therouxs Chicago Loop.
Occasions surely exist when there is no commercial
conflict of interest between the blurber and blurbee, just
as there are occasions when the blurbee is unknown, on
a personal or professional level, to the blurber. Equally, it
would be nothing less than remarkable if social ties,
loyalties and common affiliations did not play a part in
the distribution of blurbs, and if cronyism were entirely
absent from the system.
Something similar to blurbing occurs in the context
of academic writing. All things being equal, we are more
likely to cite those with whom we work or share facilities
or whom we consider close personal or professional
colleagues than we are unknowns (Cronin, 2005; Mhlck
and Persson, 2000). But we typically dont cite our friends
just because they are our friends. As White et al. (2004:
125) note: Who you know pays off only if the people you
know have something worth knowing something
plainly relevant to your own claims. There is, however,
one major difference between citing an author and
blurbing an author. Academic writing, unlike the writing
of endorsements and testimonials, is governed by a
tacitly understood set of norms; and the pressure to
conform to these community norms (e.g. bestowing
credit where credit is due; acknowledging the contri-
butions of others ideas and input to ones own work) is
considerable. Neither plagiarism nor the failure to cite

relevant work is taken lightly within the academy. But an
author who pens an inflated blurb or praises a book he
has not read is unlikely to incur the wrath of his pro-
fessional colleagues in the way that a citationally errant
scholar would. There is also a clear expectation, on the
publishers side at least, that a blurb will be positive: not
so with citations. No publisher in his right mind would
use a solicited preview that was negative or equivocal in
character. Unlike scientific and literary reviews, which are
drawn upon selectively post publication, the blurb does
not entertain negativity. Blurbs are brief, effusive and
often edited by the publisher.
SOME UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
The surface similarities between blurbing and both
citation and acknowledgment Dirks (n.d., online) has
observed that blurbs, along with the people listed in the
acknowledgments, often offer information about who the
authors friends and major influences are caused us to
wonder if we couldnt take the Spy Magazine approach a
few steps further. How many blurbs does the average
book have? Does blurbing intensity vary by domain?
What sort of backgrounds, organizational affiliations and
credentials do blurbers have? Are there boundary-
spanning endorsers who provide blurbs for more than
one subject area, or do most blurbers operate in familiar
territory? Is there evidence of reciprocal blurbing among
authors (the practice exposed anecdotally by Spy
Magazine and others over the years) akin to collegiate
citing which would support the popular conviction that
back scratching and cronyism are commonplace? Are
there perhaps (micro) networks of blurbers just as there
are author citation networks, with serial blurbers the
equivalents of highly cited authors, in the sense that they
are approached frequently by authors and publishers to
write blurbs because of their literary reputation, scholarly
eminence and/or celebrity? Are there blurbing nodes:
authors who frequently provide plaudits (outbound
blurbs) and frequently receive plaudits (inbound blurbs)?
To the best of our knowledge, there has not been any
kind of statistical analysis of blurbing. We thus designed
a modest study to gather some initial data on the extent
of the phenomenon and the nature of the exchange
networks (if any) inscribed in these paratextual spaces.
For convenience and practicality we used the local
(Bloomington, Indiana) outlets of two major bookstores
(Borders and Barnes & Noble) as our sampling frame,
focusing on two broad subject areas: business and history.
We examined every book (trade and academic) in the
relevant sections, identified those that were first editions
(usually but not necessarily hardbacks) and also carried
blurbs (sometimes explicitly labelled as Advance praise
on the dust-jacket). It should be noted that some books
carry neither blurbs nor reviews. Second, some books
carry blurbs, some blurbs and reviews, and some reviews
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BLAISE CRONIN and KATHRYN LA BARRE
only. Third, most but not all blurbs appear on the dust
jacket or cover of the book. We excluded all reviews from
consideration (whether attributed to a named individual
or a publication, such as the London Review of Books),
restricting ourselves to pre-publication blurbs solicited
by the publisher and/or author. For each blurb-bearing
book (N = 450) we recorded standard data elements: title,
subject category, publisher, date, author name, number
of blurbs and names of blurbers. We also coded basic
biographical information on authors and blurbers (e.g.
institutional affiliations), using Google to check and
source information. In total, we analysed 290 history and
160 business books.
BLURB SATISTICS
It soon became clear that a working sample of 450 books
and 1850 blurbs, drawn from just two subject areas,
would be inadequate to expose any underlying networks
of reciprocal blurbing, assuming for the moment that
such in fact existed. A much larger slice of the publishing
pie will be needed to test for evidence of systematic log-
rolling. We were able, however, to generate some bench-
mark data on the practice of blurbing, though, given the
modest size of our sample, one shouldnt read too much
into any of the numbers that follow. In history, the
average (mean) blurb rate (i.e. number of blurbs per
book) was 3.2, while in business it was 5.7. The mode, a
more useful measure in this case, was 5 for both history
and business. The blurb range in business was 1 to 35:
nine books had one blurb each, while two books (Patrick
McKennas First Among Equals and Kevin Cashmans
Awakening the Leader Within) each had a remarkable 35; in
history the range was 1 to 10; 48 books had one blurb;
only two (Simon Montefiores Stalin and Thomas
Barnetts The Pentagons New Map) had 10.
Some publishers are more partial to blurbs than
others, as the two rank-ordered lists suggest (Tables 1 and
2). In the history sample, Jossey-Bass, John Murray,
Scribner and Hodder & Stoughton all had an average of
six or more, while Penguin and the Free Press, for
example, averaged three. In business, Jossey-Bass was
again in contention with an average of 8.7, but the top-
ranking publishing house was the aptly named Hyperion
with 24 perhaps the lady doth protest too much in this
case. University presses are not averse to blurbing:
among business book publishers, MIT averaged 7.5 and
Wharton (Penn) seven, while both the Chicago and
Indiana presses averaged five. Among history book pub-
lishers, Yale and the Oxford University Press had blurb
rates of 4.4 and 3.4, respectively.
Most blurbers featured only once in our sample.
Tables 3 and 4 show the most frequent blurbers (i.e. those
named at least thrice) in both history (N = 30) and
business (N = 25). The history list includes a number of
distinguished scholars, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr of
19
Patterns of puffery: an analysis of non-fiction blurbs

Table 1. Business publishers ranked by average Table 2. History publishers ranked by average
number of blurbs per book number of blurbs per book
Publisher Mean Number Publisher Mean Number
blurb rate of books blurb rate of books
Hyperion 24 1 Jossey-Bass 8 1
Free Press 11.1 8 Naval Institute Press 8 1
Jossey-Bass 8.7 11 John Murray Publishers Limited 7 1
Broadway Books 8 2 Lisa Drew Book 7 1
Fireside Books 7.5 2 Putnam 6.5 2
MIT Press 7.5 2 Atria Books 6 1
Amacom 7 1 Beacon Press 6 1
Wharton School Publishing 7 3 Harbor House 6 1
Crown Publishers 6.8 8 Hodder and Stoughton 6 1
Dearborn 6.5 6 Invisible Cities Press 6 1
Penguin 6.1 8 Metropolitan Books 6 1
Agate 6 1 Scribner 6 2
American Management Assoc. 6 2 Broadway Books 5 1
Verso 6 1 Castle Books 5 2
John Wiley and Sons 5.6 29 Yale University Press 4.4 10
Doubleday 5.4 9 Viking 4.3 3
Gotham Books 5.3 3 Random House 4.2 12
Advertising Age 5 1 Alfred A. Knopf 4 16
Indiana University Press 5 1 Brasseys 4 1
Prima Venture 5 1 Chronicle Books 4 1
University of Chicago Press 5 1 Encounter Books 4 1
HarperCollins 4.7 10 Harcourt 4 1
Harvard University Press 4.6 12 Hull and Wang 4 1
Warner Business Books 4.4 5 Hyperion 4 1
Thomas Nelson 4.2 5 John Harper Press 4 1
Berrett-Koehler 4 3 Truman Talley 4 1
Princeton University Press 4 3 University Press of Kansas 4 3
Time Warner 4 1 Verso 4 1
William Morrow 4 1 William Morrow 4 2
New Press 3.5 2 Basic Books 3.8 4
Random House 3.5 2 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 3.8 6
Simon and Schuster 3.5 2 HarperCollins 3.8 13
Entrepreneur Press 3 1 Ballantine Books 3.7 3
Harmony 3 1 Gotham Books 3.7 3
Little Brown and Co. 3.7 3
Simon and Schuster 3.7 15
University of Chicago Press 3.5 2
Harvard and James McPherson of Princeton, as well as Walker Publishing Co. 3.5 1
best-selling historical authors, David McCullough and Oxford University Press 3.4 11
Lady Antonia Fraser, along with Michael Beschloss, Andre Deutsch LTD 3 1
presidential historian and media commentator. The list
Arcade Publishing 3 1
also includes US Senator John McCain and sometime
US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Schlesinger Atlantic Monthly Press 3 3
accounted for 10 blurbs in a sample of 160 books, which Carroll Graf Publishers 3 3
makes one wonder what his lifetime blurb total must Crown Publishers 3 6
be, not just in history but across the publishing board. Forum 3 1
The business list is also mixed. It features well-known

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 BLAISE CRONIN and KATHRYN LA BARRE

Table 2. Continued Table 4. Most frequent blurbers: business

Publisher Mean Number Blurber Number of blurbs
blurb rate of books
Blanchard, Ken 11
Free Press 3 1 Tracy, Brian 7
I.B.Tauris 3 1 Bennis, Warren 6
Lyons Press 3 1 Maxwell, John C. 6
Modern Library 3 1 Solow, Robert 4
Penguin 3 1 Ries, Al 4
Prima Publishing 3 1 Dell, Michael 4
Regency Publishing 3 1 Drucker, Peter 4
Stackpole Books 3 1 Mackay, Harvey 3
Steerforth Press 3 1 Bossidy, Larry 3
Time Warner 3 1 Cathy, Dan T. 3
University of Kentucky Press 3 1 Christensen, Clayton 3
Covey, Stephen R. 3
Gates, Bill 3
Table 3. Most frequent blurbers: history Godin, Seth 3
Bach, David 3
Blurber Number of blurbs
Levitt, Arthur 3
Schlesinger, Arthur 10 Ziglar, Zig 3
McPherson, James M. 9 Moore, Geoffrey 3
Bradley, James 7 Nasar, Sylvia 3
Isaacson, Walter 7 Peters, Tom 3
Beschloss, Michael 6 Seidenberg, Ivan 3
Ellis, Joseph J. 5 Tichy, Noel 3
McCain, John 5 Trump, Donald J. 3
Winik, Jay 5 Harai, Owen 3
Gallagher, Gary W. 4
Robertson Jr, James I. 4
Sides, Hampton 4
B-school professors such as Warren Bennis and Clayton
Yardley, Jonathan 4
Christensen (themselves best-selling authors), manage-
Brinkley, Douglas 4 ment guru Peter Drucker, Nobel laureate Robert Solow
Foreman, Amanda 4 and a few titans of the business world, Bill Gates, Donald
McCullough, David 4 Trump and Michael Dell. Ken Blanchard, with 11, was the
Bears, Edwin C. 3 business samples leading serial blurber.
Atkinson, Rick 3 We unearthed a small number of boundary
Faust, Drew Gilpin 3 spanning blurbers, individuals who featured in both the
Brands, H.W. 3 history and business sub-samples (Table 5). Walter
Chang, Iris 3 Isaacson, who furnished seven blurbs in history, also
Fellman, Michael 3 provided two business blurbs. Other cross-over blurbers
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe 3 included academicians Noam Chomsky and Joseph
Stiglitz, media personalities Tom Brokaw and Larry King,
Anderson, Jon Lee 3
and Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind.
Hanson, Victor Davis 3 We categorized all 1850 blurbs according to the
Keegan, John 3 blurbers primary institutional affiliation: academic,
Kissinger, Henry 3 government, industry, media, military, other or unknown
Morgan, Edmund S. 3 (Figure 1). Media accounted for 40 percent of all blurbs,
Neely Jr, Mark E. 3 with industry (24 percent) and academia (23 percent)
Roberts, Andrew 3 next in line. Sub-group analysis revealed two distinct
Fraser, Antonia 3 profiles. In history books (Figure 2), 52 percent of all
blurbs came from blurbers in the media world, with

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Patterns of puffery: an analysis of non-fiction blurbs

4% Table 5. Blurbers in both history and business

1%
Blurber History Business Total
16% unknown
academic Albright, Madeline K. 1 1 2
government Bescholss, Michael 6 1 7
5%
industry
Brokaw, Tom 3 1 4
Chomsky, Noam 1 1 2
media
Cuomo, Mario 2 1 3
46% military Isaacson, Walter 7 2 9
25% other King, Larry 1 1 2
Kissinger, Henry 3 1 4
Lehrer, Jim 1 1 2
Figure 1. Blurbers by affiliation Lewis, Michael 1 1 2
Nasar, Slyvia 2 3 5
Stiglitz, Joseph 1 1 2
Yergin, Daniel 2 2 4

4%
academics following some distance behind (32 percent).
4% 1% In business (Figure 3), the dominant blurbing groups
unknown were industry (49 percent), media (29 percent) and
32% academic academia (14 percent).
government
industry RECIPROCAL BLURBING
media We found only three examples of back-scratching and
military these were in the popular business book sub-set of the
52% business sample. So, David Bach writes of Jean Chatzkys
other
6% You Dont Have to be Rich: Jean Chatzky has done it again!
. . . This is a wonderful road map to not just money, but
1% greater happiness. Of Chatzkys Pay it Down he says:
Figure 2. History blurbers by affiliation Jean Chatzky helps you change the way you think about
money and shows that getting out of debt is not as hard
as it seems. Bach is duly rewarded for his praise. His
book, The Automatic Millionaire, according to the recipro-
cating Chatzky, gives you step by step, everything you
need to secure your financial future. When you do it
David Bachs way, failure is not an option.
4% On three occasions, Ken Blanchard provides
1%
0%
14% gushing blurbs for John C. Maxwell. This one accompa-
unknown nies Maxwells Failing Forward: Failing Forward is one of
academic the most important books youll ever read today . . .
3%
Maxwell, in turn, produces two puffs for the blurbing
government
29% Blanchard. This is what he has to say about Blanchards
industry The One Minute Apology: A Powerful Way to Make Things
media Better: Learning to apologize has to be an irrefutable law.
military
The One Minute Apology tells you how. Read it and have
a better life.
other The third case involved the exchange of one blurb
49%
apiece between Seth Godin (Purple Cow: Transform Your
Business by Being Remarkable) and Christopher Meyer,
Figure 3. Business blurbers by affiliation co-author, with Stan Davis, of Its Alive: The Coming
Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business. Heres

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Godin on Its Alive: Holy cow! Integrating biology,
management, nanotech and evolution if you loved
James Gleicks Chaos, youll love Its Alive. And now
Christopher Meyer on Godins book: Purple Cow wrings
out the rules that ring true in Godins post-TV-Industrial-
Complex world. Each of the hundreds of business
examples is on the mark, but step back and see that
Godin has been carefully taking his own advice: Seth
Godin is a Purple Cow!
CONCLUSIONS
We used a convenience sample to explore the publishing
epiphenomenon of blurbing. In the process, we
identified a population of 450 non-fiction books, most of
which were first editions and published in the last few
years. Since we dont know how representative our
sample is of the universe of recently published titles in
business and history, generalizations must be made with
caution. That said, it is clear that blurbing is common-
place (we gathered 1850 specimens), even if we have
only scratched the surface of this promotional ploy in
our study.
By way of specifics, business books make greater
use of blurbs than do history books, though in both
domains five is the modal number of blurbs per book.
Some books come with a single blurb, others with 20, 30
or more, which is either a sign of an extraordinary literary
talent or evidence of marketing excess. As we saw, some
publishing houses make more use of blurbs than others,
but since many publishers were represented in our
sample by only one or two titles, there is a need for more
data. A majority of blurbers comes from media back-
grounds; considerably fewer from academia. Presumably,
media-conferred celebrity is important in ensuring
blurber name recognition. What use a glowing blurb if
the reader has never heard of the praise-giver? The
closest we came to serial blurbers were the historian,
Arthur Schlesinger Jr, who penned 10 and Ken Blanchard
who accounted for 11 in business. A few blurbers featured
in both the business and history sets, and, for all we
know, may also feature in other unexamined literatures.
We did not identify any coteries of back-scratching
blurbers. The three cases of reciprocal blurbing we
unearthed were at the sub-scholarly end of the business
book spectrum.
Blurbing, it seems reasonable to conclude, has
become institutionalized practice in both contemporary
trade and trade/scholarly publishing. But it is a practice
that has yet to be explored systematically on a large scale.
It is also, to return to a point touched on in the introduc-
tion, a mercantile site that invites rigorous economic
analysis. More concretely, it seems appropriate to ask
whether, how and to what extent blurbs, as opposed to
book reviews, influence book selection and collection
development practices within libraries of different types.
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BLAISE CRONIN and KATHRYN LA BARRE
We really know very little about the material significance
of book jacket endorsements.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to Yvonne Rogers, Debora Shaw and an
anonymous referee for comments and to Fagdeba
Bakoyema for assistance with data collection.
REFERENCES
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Davis, M. (1994) Theorizing the Blurb, Meanjin,
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Dirks, J. (n.d.) How to Read a Book, URL (consulted
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Fischer, R. (2004) Your Book Stinks, URL (consulted
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articles/article-126.html
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Patterns of puffery: an analysis of non-fiction blurbs
Foggo, D. (2004) Authors Admit Faking Blurbs on Dire
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