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282 Suggestions for Further Reading

customs or the uses of buildings. On Baedeker, see Francis Watson, “The Education of Baedeker,” The Fortnightly, CXLVI (Dec., 1936), 698-702; Arnold Palmer, “The Baedeker Firmament,” The Fortnightly, CLXXII (Sept., 1949), 200-205; W. G. Constable, “Three Stars for Baedeker,” Harper’s, CCVI (April, 1953), 76-83; Arthur J. Olsen, “A Tour of Baedeker,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 29, 1959, pp. 92, 94; and “Peripa-tetics: Two-Star Civilization,” Time, IV (Jan. 9, 1950), 15-16. To my knowledge there is no adequate biography in English either of the first Karl Baedeker or of the Baedeker enterprises, nor is there a satisfactory history of travel guidebooks. Ali these are most amusing and instructive subjects. Unfailing and omni-present sources on attitudes toward travel are, of course, the articles and advertisements in current magazines and newspapers, travel posters, advertising brochures, and television commercials —to all of which we have much better access than will futurę historians.

Chapter 4. From Shapes to Shadows:

Dissohing Forms

Academic critics, however little they may understand the processes of artistic creation, still determine which forms of art are to be considered “serious.” This they do mainly on pedagogical or professional grounds. Subjects which have “al-ways” been lectured on and examined about are of course those which continue to be easiest to lecture on and examine about. If you have nothing else to say, you can always comment on what others have said on the same subject. This situation is worst in the most respectable institutions. At Oxford University, Eng-land, for example, the study of the English common law and of English literaturę entered the curriculum only very late; there the study of American history has hardly yet come to be taken seriously. Such institutions set a tyrannic pattern: books on American history still have a surprisingly smali audience in England.

In our age of fluid art forms and rapidly changing techniques of art and dramatic reproduction, the customs of the academic community have a morę insulating effect than ever before. These customs inevitab!y lead us to ignore the profound implications of great current changes in our forms of art, literaturę, and drama. I do not know of a regular course on the art of the movies in a department of literaturę in a single major university, although there may be such. A result is that many of our scholara who are best equipped to judge contemporary dramatic forms against those of earlier ages ostracize the leading forms of our own age. Meanwhile, there are numerous courses on the far less significant dramatic works (written in conventional form for the stage) of minor playwrights.

One symptom of this freezing of categories is the long separa-tion of the study of the history of printing and of publishing from the history of literaturę. An admirable introductory vol-ume which helps bring all these together is Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt and others, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States (2d ed., 1952).

A comprehensive history of the popularization of knowledge could help us understand the effect of the rise of liberalism and democratic institutions on our ways of thinking about every-thing, and on our very conceptions of “knowledge” and “art.” An important chapter in this story is the history of translation. See, for example, F. O. Matthiessen, Translation, An Eliza-bethan Art (1931). There have, of course, been numerou3 his-tories of Biblical translation; but we could leam much from a broader study of how in recent times paths have been madę from works in leamed or foreign languages to the masses of the new literates who read only their own vernacular.

Donald Sheehan, This was Publishing: A Chronicie of the Book Trade in the Gilded Age (1952) draws on the records of Henry Holt and Company, Harper & Brothers, Dodd, Mead and Company, and Charles Scribner’3 Sons (and the flies of Publishers' Weekly) to produce a valuably detailed and unrc-manticized account of publishing practices between the Civil War and World War I; this was a crucial period for the purposes of the present volume. The chapter by Malcolm Cowley, “How Writers Lived,” in Robert E. Spiller and others (eds.), Literary History of the United States (3 voIs., 1948), II, 1263-1272, is a knowledgeable and incisive account of the relation of new publishing techniques and opportunities to the writer’s profession between World War I and the mid-1940’s.

We are fortunate to have some excel!ent books—both metie-ulous in facts and readable in style—on the history of popular and best-selling books in the United States. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947) was a pioneer work and remains a lively and readable introduction to a miscellaneous subject. Defining a “best seller” as a book that had a sale equal to 1 per cent of the population of the Continental United States (or the English Colo-nies in the years before the Revolution) for the decade in which