Blackmailed wealthy people into buying entries in the never published vanity publication Indians of Merit and Distinction under the threat of seeing their scandals exposed in Gup Shup.

Many libraries and reviewers do not clearly distinguish between vanity publications and self-publications.

Martin S. Walker, president of Periodical Studies Service, a New York magazine consulting firm, calls it "the first vanity publication Time Inc. has ever published."

Some scientific journals are little more than vanity publications to which authors pay "page charges" to have their work in print.

Oh, he could indulge in vanity publication at his own expense-but who reads a vanity publication?

Everything that is, except for the pale and personable little man hunched, pen in hand, over a big red autograph-ready stack of his latest vanity publication: 10,000 copies of "Our New York," a ruminative post-Sept.

A vanity publication, I'm afraid.

Murdoch's companies published two novels by his then wife: Family Business (1988) and Coming to Terms (1991), both widely regarded as vanity publications.

The book is put out by Arcadia Publishing, which has produced books of old photos of towns in New Jersey and other states, sort of vanity publications with very local appeal.

However, many publications using the title are vanity publications, where the inclusion criterion is the biographee's willingness to buy the book, with the business model consisting of selling books directly to the biographees.