Authors Reviewing Their Own Books? Thus It Has Ever Been (Even In The 1800s)

Reporting from London back to his native land in 1822, the American nationalist James Kirke Paulding claimed that nine of 10 reviews in British periodicals “originate in personal, political, and religious antipathies or attachments” and “it is almost as common for an author to puff his own book in the magazines, as for a quack doctor to be his own trumpeter in the newspapers.”