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Comment by chrissam | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly how I look at it. To quote Orwell: "Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival".

There's a lot of survivor bias there, however.

A lot of works that were under-appreciated during their time had their extemporaneous advocates and promoters that had their own motivations that often had little to do with appreciation for the work.

If Kafka's editor had listened to Kafka and burned his works instead of making sure they got on as many bookshelves as possible, or if Van Gogh didn't have the close relationship he had with his art-dealer brother, we almost certainly wouldn't remember their works today.

I don't doubt their are many unknown masters ahead of their time that will forever remain in obscurity.

Of course. Although this begs the inverse question: are there any long-gone heralded geniuses of literature who actually just wrote crap? I doubt it.

Well, there's enough room for disagreement about who a genius is and what a crap book is. I say, "yes", as long as someone else is heralding the genius and I get to decide what "crap" is.

It would be survivorship bias if we assumed, based on the old books we have, that all old books on average were better than modern books. I don't think that's the argument being made here.

Let's assume for a moment that all famous old books are good books. We might then say that time is a great filter because all of the old books we know of are good books.

However, it might be that time actually has a false negative rate of 99.9%. Almost all of the great old books are filtered out by time. In that case, time probably sucks as a filter. But then again, if your only goal is "read only great books," time is still a useful filter even if it has a terrible false negative rate, since it's irrelevant to you that there are lots of other books being excluded, so long as you get a sufficient supply of good books.

You are so right. I am reading West with the Night, an excellent book that didn't sell well when first published in 1942 for various reasons, from bad timing during WWII to being under advertised. Almost forgotten until 1982 when someone read Hemingway's letters praising it, found a copy of the book and persuaded the publisher to re-issue it. It became a best seller.

>Ernest Hemingway was deeply impressed with Markham's writing, saying "she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_with_the_Night

Sometimes books speak to people having certain lifstyle and experiences and culture. We are not part of that anymore so they suck to us. But, being for someone else is not necessary lack of merit. Whether it was pure enjoyment or something more people took from it.

There are bad books nobody liked at time and never again. But when seemingly bad book was popular, then it likely filled some need or said somethig they wanted or needed to hear.

I'm pretty sure that Dianetics will survive a vast pile of higher quality books.

The overall point remains valid, however.

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