Parallels between criticism and collecting
Strikes me that there is this similarity between literary criticism and book collecting: only by reading an author’s entire oeuvre can a critic authoritatively state which works are the strongest, which the most and which the least successful. Only by knowing the range of prices that are out there in the marketplace can the collector get a true sense of whether or not she’s getting a bargain. The more she studies pricing, the better able she is to determine value. The more books the critic reads, the better positioned he is to identify quality, to…determine value.
March 13th, 2010 at 10:17 AM
Yeah, agreed! And well stated.