It was the title — Are You a Bromide? — that caught my attention. Potassium bromide is used in medicine as a sedative; literary bromides, anti-aphorisms, have the same effect. In this slim book, published in the early 1900s, author and humorist Gelett Burgess defines two types of people: the Bromide, who “does his thinking by syndicate… and may be depended upon to be trite, banal and arbitrary,” and the Sulphite, who “who does his own thinking … sees everything as if for the first time, and not through the blue glasses of convention.” The book was popular enough in its time to have gone through at least 11 printings, since I found a copy of the 11th edition in a bookshop in Jonesville, New York.

Burgess offers up sample “Bromidioms” — e.g., “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like” and “Of course, if you leave your umbrella at home it’s sure to rain” — but, alas, doesn’t offer up any sample Sulphidioms as a counterweight to the clichés. A couple he might have considered…

Art serves to rinse out our eyes. —Karl Kraus

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain. —author unknown

So, technically, the latter saying is a proverb not an aphorism, but it’s still nevertheless a Sulphidiom.

Burgess has some odd claims to fame. He is the author of “The Purple Cow: Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who's Quite Remarkable, at Least,” which reads in full:

I never saw a purple cow

I never hope to see one;

But I can tell you, anyhow,

I’d rather see than be one!

He published two collections of “maxims” — The Maxims of Noah and The Maxims of Methuselah — both of which contain painfully sexist advice about relationships and neither of which consists of actual maxims.

But, most amazingly to me, he invented the term ‘blurb.’ Burgess attributed the copy on the cover of Are You a Bromide? to one “Miss Belinda Blurb,” and included a photo of Miss Blurb “in the act of blurbing,” who commends this title to us because, among other reasons, “It has gush and go to it, it has that Certain Something which makes you want to crawl through thirty miles of dense tropical jungle and bite somebody in the neck.”

The best blurb ever, in my opinion, is by Ezra Pound and, though never intended to appear on any cover, it so accurately describes the contents of a great book:

The book should be a ball of light in the hands.