So the question is, who judges what works go into the canon that an apprentice must study from? Clearly, the canon doesn’t have to be exhaustive, only representative, *if* the goal is simply to get better. So Melville might go in, while his colleague across town, who is just as good, is left out. For the craftsman, who is only using the canon as a springboard for his own work, the choice of one or the other doesn’t matter; just as long as the canon doesn’t become too bloated to prevent an apprentice from arriving at the leading edge in a reasonable amount of time. But one must recognize that this canon has been created for a specific purpose. The appreciation of past works is not under the same constraints with respect to the canon, as the pedagogical use of those works. Thus it is lazy scholarship that appropriates the craftsman’s canon and insists that it should also serve as the afficianado’s canon.

A large part of scholarship concerns the compression of past works into chunks that are manageable (well, we’ve got pretty good pattern recognition machinery, so I guess one could reasonably expect us to try to make everything into patterns). Otherwise, who would have the time to delve into the arcana of every field over all of history (SIS once published a stat that it would take 1 person 1000 years to read the combined publications of medical science produced in 1 year)? It is difficult to get a statistical esthetic from things like literature, so one way to compress a field is to produce a canon. But one needs to be clear as to whether that canon is being produced to learn technique or to appreciate the fruits of applying technique. For the former, there is a clear path to consensus on what is craftsmanship and what is crap, for the latter, there is far more room for individual preference.

Do you see your effort as a way to improve the canon? I think that’s very likely; apply some collective cognition to the problem of scholarship and the results will improve. Or do you think that there is some way to avoid a canon for works in which an esthetic component is primary?

This novel is said to be by the author of Jane Eyre, and was eagerly caught at by a famished public, on the strength of the report. It afforded, however, but little nutriment, and has universally disappointed expectation. There is an old saying that those who eat toasted cheese at night will dream of Lucifer. The author of Wurthering Heights has evidently eat [sic] toasted cheese. How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors, such as we might suppose a person, inspired by a mixture of brandy and gunpowder, might write for the edification of fifth-rate blackguards. Were Mr. Quilp alive we should be inclined to believe that the work had been dictated by him to Lawyer Brass, and published by the interesting sister of that legal gentleman.

From “Review of New Books” in Graham’s Magazine, Philadelphia, July 1848, Vol 33, Number 1, pg. 60

But let’s explore. The best-made furniture you see on Antiques Roadshow is found where? In people’s houses, handed down through generations? No, at least half the folks find them in the trash, at garage sales, in junk shops. “How much did you pay?”, “$10″ is not an exchange that connotes long-standing honored status of the piece.

And besides, you’re introducing a survivorship bias there with your lifetime standard.

Cheap crap that doesn’t last is—and has always been—the most popular stuff. At least for 200 years. If you think otherwise, you haven’t been to many estate auctions. Today’s particleboard Sauderware is no different from our best-selling books, and I’m willing to make the case that it never has been. People from Classical times have been decrying the lost golden age of craft, whether it’s a play or a piece of stoneware.

They’ve never made it like they used to, at least as far as authorities have said.

But unlike the pots, the furniture, and even the plays, we are reviving the otherwise short-lived books and music of the past. Preserving it on equal footing with its more refined, and admired, contemporary classic work.

I’ve scanned and OCRed and proofread novels and short stories written by Herman Melville’s colleagues and friends. You’ve never read them, and they were never considered classics. Nor was his big rambling book, for nearly a century. But they are on the face of it indistinguishable: the metaphor, the voice, the sense of humor, the themes, the language, the symbolism.

Are they crap? They’re works that never made it, and they are now lost in time and unremarked. They’re not part of the canon, and never have been. So by modern, and perhaps even scholarly, standards: yes. They lost the race.

I’ll wager some, if not much, was written with a thought of craft, but a draught of rushing to make ends meet.

But now they’re back. Zombie-style. Go tell me which is worth remembering.

“Good, fast, cheap”. A craftsman picks any two; a hack only the last two.

Recall that I’m taking the long, historical perspective here, essentially.

Pick a time. Pick a handful of the classics of that time, its Important Works as determined by All the Important Judges thereof. Pick a handful of the bestsellers of the time, its chaff, dismissed or ignored by same Judges.

I’ll assume they’re different.

Now show a few short runs of individual pages to lots of diverse people, and have them pick which is “classic” and which “hack”. Repeat until you believe me.

‘Craftsmen and dedicated amateurs’, sure, but ‘craftsmen and hacks’? Not a chance.

“But the victims don’t deserve this inevitable pain, nor will they be prepared. For the most part, they have not been trained for it.”

How else to find out if one’s training was any good?