It’s summer, and the gossip mills are grinding again in the Hamptons—and everywhere else that the beautiful people gather. So it’s appropriate that we bring you an exclusive look at a new book-in-process, GOSSIP ABOUT GOSSIP, apparently the first ever such history. The writer is David Wallace, author of five books of Hollywood history (“The New York Times” hailed his 2001 book Lost Hollywood as “an inspired concept”). He’s also a 40-year veteran of the gossip business including a decade as National Correspondent of “People Weekly” and Liz Smith’s man in Tinsletown (plus a short stint with the “National Enquirer”). Here’s a bit from the Introduction to the book...

Show me someone who never gossips, and I will show you someone who is not interested in people.

—Barbara Walters

Gossip is the world’s most popular form of communication.

Now that’s a statement that can surely scare the willies out of many conservative folks. Every religion condemns it despite the word’s root being “godsibb” meaning “a person related to one in God.” It has of course, destroyed countless friendships, marriages, and careers, and caused people to kill themselves. It has even started wars (the Spanish-American War for one). But it’s also enhanced the lives of millions, and can be just plain fun.

In fact, a recent survey turned up the astonishing fact that people spend up to two/thirds of their time gossiping, making scuttlebutt (gossip is always about people) the most popular form of human communication. Think about it for a moment: while humor can warm any social event, a good scoop can spread through a room like an irresistible drug.

It’s been this way for tens of thousands of years. Gossip maven Liz Smith offers one reason: it’s all about “news,” she explains, albeit tarted up a bit and “running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.” As Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone recently reminded us, gossip has long been called “the second oldest profession.”

Before written history, gossip was actually essential for survival, providing vital information about where food could be found, who was the best hunter, what was safe to eat, how to cure sicknesses, and the like. Dish, probably, too: “Did you know so-and-so in the next cave is sleeping with...?” Gossip About Gossip is packed with delicious gossip both historical (was King Edward VII’s son the notorious Jack the Ripper? Was the Duchess of Windsor a hermaphrodite?) and contemporary (Hollywood’s secret gay underground).

Gossip can also establish common values and define boundaries of personal and group behavior (by tales of rewards for good deeds and retribution for bad deeds) as well as humanizing relationships. Liz Smith dealt in the kindest sort of gossip for much of her long career, but was well aware of the downside of her profession—and its appeal: “Good gossip is just what’s going on,” she said. “Bad gossip is stuff that is salacious, mean, and bitchy,” adding that it is “the kind most people really enjoy.”

Ancient civilizations loved to dish and ancient graffiti abound with examples as a visit to the ruins of Pompeii makes clear. Egyptian hieroglyphics were recently uncovered that contain what once must have been sensational gossip about everything from the baldness of the queen, harem intrigue, to, in one 5,000 year-old text, the sexual orientation of the king.

Gossip About Gossip begins its rollicking and sometimes tragic story from prehistory and continues through the ancient world and renaissance Italy to 18th century England and France where gossip was such a way of life it was broken down into categories. In the 19th century gossip’s accessibility spread rapidly through yellow journalism.

The arrival of mass communication in the 20th century—along with the invention of celebrity, the inevitable result of the star-making movie industry—created careers for those who promulgated gossip. In the days when newspapers and radio ruled, they included Hollywood’s twin terrors of dish, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons; Maury Paul (the original Cholly Knickerbocker, who coined the term “cafe society”); the political columnist Drew Pearson, who notoriously filled one of a gossip maven’s primary functions by daring to print the previously unprintable. Most powerful was the famous/infamous Walter Winchell whose then familiar coyness with names (as in “K----- was seen kissing J-----”) was actually pioneered in the early 1700s by Daniel Defoe who created the world’s first gossip newspaper a decade and a half before writing Robinson Crusoe. With the arrival of such publications as Confidential, the National Enquirer, People and the like, it’s become a very big business.

Today gossip has been transformed by the PC. By enabling more and more people to work at home (thus socially isolating them), it’s led to the blogosphere which is seen by many of its devotees as a connected community that replaced dishing around the water cooler with its own powerful gossip mavens (Perez Hilton among the most visible). And of course there are the paparazzi, a phenomenon created by our demand to see as well as know; today the trade in paparazzi images has become a billion dollar industry with more than a few celebrities themselves participating by being paid for intimate shots.

Put it all together—humankind’s love for dish, the blogosphere, and today’s video/photo technology—and it appears that not only did Truman Capote know what he was talking about when he predicted that gossip would become “the literature of the 21st century,” it’s already become a major part of our 21st century lifestyle.