[holymadness]

SteveEisenberg: Whoops, hoist by my own petard. Thank you for pointing out my error.

BelleZora, latepaul, HarryT: I don't dispute there are plenty of forgettable authors on the list prior to the 1970s, but there are also a surprising number of Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners whose works are regarded as classics, whereas for more than thirty years afterwards, the top spots are dominated by mass-market thrillers. Without even entering into judgments of quality, I think it's difficult to maintain that no change occurred at all.

BWinmill: Maybe, but I have never heard of a massive shift in American educational attainment or literacy rates occurring in the mid-to-late 20th century. Seems to me that market forces are more likely to have shifted than demographics (see below).

Ralph Sir Edward: Interesting. Do you have any insight into the change of policy with regards to Dune? Was it a happy accident or a deliberate manoeuvre? And why in 1976, ten years after the original Dune?

taustin: I was thinking this, as well.

fjtorres: Thank you for those figures. Do you happen to know more about why there was a massive explosion in published titles after 1950? I guess what I want to know is: how did American publishing transition from a relatively small (and perhaps more curated) industry to a mass market free-for-all? I also think that your observations about numbers need to be paired with those above them about taste-making. In an embarrassment of riches, promotion is king.

Incidentally, your post reminded me of this passage by Aldous Huxley, which I cannot refrain myself from posting here:

"Advances in technology have led ... to vulgarity.... Process reproduction and the rotary press have made possible the indefinite multiplication of writing and pictures. Universal education and relatively high wages have created an enormous public who know how to read and can afford to buy reading and pictorial matter. A great industry has been called into existence in order to supply these commodities. Now, artistic talent is a very rare phenomenon; whence it follows ... that, at every epoch and in all countries, most art has been bad. But the proportion of trash in the total artistic output is greater now than at any other period. That it must be so is a matter of simple arithmetic. The population of Western Europe has a little more than doubled during the last century. But the amount of reading—and seeing—matter has increased, I should imagine, at least twenty and possibly fifty or even a hundred times. If there were n men of talent in a population of x millions, there will presumably be 2n men of talent among 2X millions. The situation may be summed up thus. For every page of print and pictures published a century ago, twenty or perhaps even a hundred pages are published today. But for every man of talent then living, there are now only two men of talent. It may be of course that, thanks to universal education, many potential talents which in the past would have been stillborn are now enabled to realize themselves. Let us assume, then, that there are now three or even four men of talent to every one of earlier times. It still remains true to say that the consumption of reading—and seeing—matter has far outstripped the natural production of gifted writers and draughtsmen. It is the same with hearing-matter. Prosperity, the gramophone and the radio have created an audience of hearers who consume an amount of hearing-matter that has increased out of all proportion to the increase of population and the consequent natural increase of talented musicians. It follows from all this that in all the arts the output of trash is both absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past; and that it must remain greater for just so long as the world continues to consume the present inordinate quantities of reading-matter, seeing-matter, and hearing-matter."

- Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay. A Traveller's Journal, London, 1949, pp. 274 ff. First published in 1934.

Note the date. Walter Benjamin drily noted in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that "this mode of observation is obviously not progressive."