“[I]f a novel is reviewed well in Time or the New Yorker or Newsweek etc. I am likely to order it sight unseen (often to be badly fooled, of course)… . There is something wrong with the book business. The publisher is probably far the best judge of books there is, but he simply cannot put them over. Either they sell themselves (in which case he can plunge on advertising and build them up very fast) or they do not sell. Of course we are all semi-literates over here and if a book is not ‘significant’ we think it is trash. And by ‘significant’ we mean that it does our thinking for us. God knows we can’t do it for ourselves.”
Raymond Chandler, typically dyspeptic, letter to Hamish Hamilton, January 9, 1946
