As the world economy melts down, scholarly publishers have identified at least one new growth industry: the study of celebrity.
The Routledge empire, founded in 1836, leads the way. This is perhaps a natural step. Routledge has helped many academics to become celebrities. Its website explains: "We have published many of [the] greatest thinkers and scholars of the last 100 years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre."
In November, the company will publish a four-volume, 1,600-page book called Celebrity - "destined to be valued by scholars, students and researchers as a vital research resource". It explains why: "The study of celebrity has developed and cohered into a flourishing field of social and cultural analysis."
The book tries to cover the entire range of this new, yet vast and complex field: "Celebrity brings together the best and most influential foundational and cutting-edge research on the aetiology and basic concepts of celebrity (including charisma, narcissism and commodification); theoretical and methodological approaches (eg Marxism, structuralism, semiotics and cultural materialism); the mechanics of celebrity (such as the sociology and psychology of showmanship); and key controversies and current debates (eg the politics of stardom; the superstructure of celebrity; and the interpellation of celebrity news and the media)."
The book's editor, Chris Rojek, a professor at Brunel University, has already written a book called - yes - Celebrity. Its publisher explains that it "examines why people like Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Hitler and Jerry Springer impress themselves so powerfully on the public mind". Rojek defines three academically recognised categories of celebrities - ascribed, achieved and attributed.
Rojek also creates two new categories: celetoids and celeactors. Celetoids are "lottery winners, stalkers, one-hit wonders" and the like. Celeactors are fictional characters such as James Bond, Carrie Bradshaw and Ali G. Both concepts were quickly adopted by other scholars in the field.
Rojek wrote another book focusing strictly on one of the traditional types of celebrity: achieved celebrity. Called Sinatra, it uses the singer Frank Sinatra as a matrix for exploring a broad range of theoretical and empirical questions. On page 34, for example, Rojek points out that "Sinatra expiated oleaginously on American inclusiveness and justice, while conducting a life that involved business deals with known members of the mafia, sexual libertinism, and frequent acts of violence."
For Rojek, writing those two books - Celebrity, which retailed for $19.95 (£15.50) and Sinatra at $22.95 - proved to be valuable warm-up exercises for the giant task of editing the new Routledge book, which is priced at $1,140 (£785).
For Routledge, the new book is just a beginning. Next year, it will launch a scholarly journal called Celebrity Studies. The journal already has 15 editors - and its stated goal is staggeringly ambitious. By drawing upon a range of interdisciplinary approaches, historical periods and contexts, "it seeks to make sense of celebrity".
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize