What ‘Blink’ Begat

Take just the quickest glance at stores' nonfiction bookshelves and you can't help but make this snap judgment: Malcolm Gladwell's Blink has reached the tipping point. Single-subject nonfiction is nothing new, but only Gladwell could make an industry standard out of white covers, single-word titles, sans-serif fonts, and vaguely self-help subtitles (See his own new best seller, Outliers.) Since publishers have apparently taken Blink's insta-judgment credo, "judge a book by its cover," to heart, we did some research. Behold, the future (and recent past) in blatant Blink knockoffs.