Books: The Gutenberg Fallacy

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In the year 1930, which saw the publication of Kafka's The Castle, most people were reading Edna Ferber's Cimarron; in 1934, the year of Malraux's Man's Fate, the thing to read was a massive romance called Anthony Adverse. That was also the year in which Random House, after winning a celebrated court case, published for the first time in the U.S. James Joyce's 1922 classic Ulysses. Although it does not make the grade on Miss Hackett's lists, Ulysses, nudged by a generation of college English instructors, may yet reach a million; it has sold only 570,300 so far. Perhaps one can see in this the workings of an amendment to Gresham's Law of Literature—that the bad verbal coinage drives out the good, but only for a while, after which sound currency reasserts its values.

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