I am sympathetic to the earnest pleas/emphatic requests going out from Buzz, Balls & Hype and Dan Wickett at the EWN for publicists to cease and desist from barraging litbloggers with inappropriate requests for coverage of their authors.

And I'm reminded, by twists and turns, of the weeks I spent at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris in the early 90s -- the owner, George Whitman, took an inexplicable shine to me and sent me running all over town on book-related errands. At one point I returned to find him fretting over a misplaced manuscript, one of dozens he had received, unsollicited, just in recent days. He was frantic because the cover letter -- which described the heart and soul. etc., that had gone into the letter writer's novel, which the letter writer's son, an assistant manager at K-Mart, had thought was quite good -- noted that the letter writer was sending along the only copy of her book.

I don't know if it was ever found.