This is Undoubtedly the Sausage of the Year
But how few, after all, the books that are books! Charles Lamb let his kind heart master him when he made that too brief list of books that aren’t. Book is an honourable title, not to be conferred lightly. A volume is not necessarily, as Lamb would have had us think, a book because it can be read without difficulty. The test is, whether it was worth reading. Had the author something to set forth? And had he the specific gift for setting it forth in written words? And did he use this rather rare gift conscientiously and to the full? And were his words well and appropriately printed and bound ? If you can say Yes to these questions, then only, I submit, is the title of ‘book’ deserved. If Lamb were alive now, he certainly would draw the line closer than he did.
[…]
What would he have to say of [today’s] novels, for example? These commodities are all very well in their way, no doubt. But let us have no illusions as to what their way is. The poulterer who sells strings of sausages does not pretend that every individual sausage is in itself remarkable. He does not assure us that ‘this is a sausage that gives furiously to think,’ or ‘this is a singularly beautiful and human sausage,’ or ‘this is undoubtedly the sausage of the year.’ Why are such distinctions drawn by the publisher? When he publishes, as he sometimes does, a novel that is a book (or at any rate would be a book if it were decently printed and bound) then by all means let him proclaim its difference — even at the risk of scaring away the majority of readers.
[Max Beerbohm, “Books Within Books” (1914)]
