Penguin Ad Gets Bloggers Blogging

by Lynn Andriani, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 9/21/2006

Score one for the book nerds this week, as an ad that Penguin is running in the New Yorker and New York magazine for John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise have been picked up by the cool kids over at Gawker and BoingBoing. It isn’t often that print ads for books catch the eye of the media bloggers, but Penguin’s ad managed to do so by—how else?—making a somewhat obscure Plimptonian reference.

The ad for the new paperback of Hodgman’s book, which pubbed Sept. 5, mimics an advertisement that ran in the Paris Review in the 1980s, in which editor George Plimpton hawked the Atari rival Intellivision. A little meta, yes, but as Gawker pointed out, Hodgman deserves kudos for having “mined some very obscure adverto-literary history.” The Huffington Post riffed on the ad, too: “It’s nice to know that in a slightly bizarre, and completely irrelevant way, it’s still a small, small world.”