I confess, I confess

I have received a couple of free books from publishers.  Did I tell you?  Do you care?  Well, the debate on the issue generally is getting lively here.  To me it's obvious that the source of the book is totally irrelevant.  My opinion is my opinion. 

But let's try and keep it all in perspective.  And who better to give us a hand than Dr Johnson:

"No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a publick library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditation, and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue, and preserved only to increase the pomp of learning....

Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magnificent obscurity, most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered, and owed the honours which they once obtained, not to judgment or to genius, to labour or to art, but to the prejudice of faction, the stratagem of intrigue, or the servility of adulation."

Not all the PR in the world can save you from going to obscurity in a handbasket.

Comments

[Matthew Tiffany]

I'll drink to that!

[MFS]

I just wrote about this issue: "Another tempest in a teapot, I think" --

http://mentalmultivitamin.blogspot.com/2006/11/another-tempest-in-teapot-i-think.html

[Anne]

You turned to Johnson, I, of course, to Woolf: I find it very sustaining and humbling to remember how practical our greater precursors were on these matters.

A lovely post.

[Sandra]

Cheers to you too Matthew and MFS.

Anne, your post on Virginia Woolf's attitude is perfect. I came across the Johnson quote by chance; what I loved about your post was it's depth: Virginia Woolf is not simply a list of quotable lines for you, she is a touchstone, and it really gave the post authority and a sense of 'rightness'. It struck me then, that one of the endemic problems with litblogs is that most of us aim for breadth not depth. And whilst it makes for beguiling surface glitter, our shallows are deep (to misquote Tracey Emin, I think!)