6 ms·

Time is a fantastic filter. When I was cleaning out my grandparents attic I found a few dozen old books from the 30s and 40s. Wanting to see if they had any val

Time is a fantastic filter. When I was cleaning out my grandparents attic I found a few dozen old books from the 30s and 40s. Wanting to see if they had any value I searched Amazon Ebay and even Google. I could find no record of them having ever even existed. I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.

cicero 8y ago
Time does filter out the bad books, and most books that are written fall into that category, but the books that endure the test of time are really good.
chrissam 8y ago
This is exactly how I look at it. To quote Orwell: "Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival".
- jszymborski 8y ago
  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.
  - tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
    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.
    - klodolph 8y ago
      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.
  - inimino 8y ago
    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.
    - CobrastanJorji 8y ago
      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.
  - kwelstr 8y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_with_the_Night
- watwut 8y ago
  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.
- Diederich 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure that Dianetics will survive a vast pile of higher quality books. The overall point remains valid, however.
jolmg 8y ago
Many (probably most) books today suck too. Not to say there aren't a lot of modern, quality books out there, but I think there's a boundless amount of new, bad books.
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  I discussed this problem with a professor-friend (philosophy of science) of mine. He made two solid points: (1) The pressure and rapidity of publishing - for many authors - means less time spent on individual projects. (2) Your expectations as a reader partially determine your judgement as to how much value a book has. As your expectations increase...
  - jolmg 8y ago
    > (2) Your expectations as a reader partially determine your judgement as to how much value a book has. As your expectations increase... I understand this to mean that my ever-improving taste might make it seem like, as time goes by, a greater and greater proportion of books seem to be of low quality. However, it works the other way around, too: As people through new generations become ever more easily satisfied with mediocre writing, the need to produce high-quality works decreases. At least, this is what I think is happening with TV.
    - anongraddebt 8y ago
      Good point. I think both can be happening simultaneously.
- lscotte 8y ago
  And unlike those old publications, there are digital copies now so they won't die the death they deserve. I say it with sarcism, but there's some amount of seriousness in there...
  - kijin 8y ago
    At least we have different filters now. Nobody is going to buy an obscure digital book that only has 0.8 stars, and Amazon probably won't recommend it to anybody.
gopalv 8y ago
> I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked. It could be worse - they could be fascinating, but entirely irrelevant to the modern world view. My dad had a cache of books from a friend of his - that was collected from the pre-independence era for India from 1920s to 1945. The world in those books were strange - the era looks like nothing like the world from my text books. The "Great war" had just passed ("between cousins"), there was wistful memories of the Russian empire, of china being conquered by the japanese. Oil empires in Burma (Burmah-Shell), political deals with the Kings of Siam, health of Austro-Hungarian royal inbreeding. The shades of gray in which Belgian kings and Cecil Rhodes got painted as conquerors ,liberators and genocidal maniacs in one go. All the important intellectuals are German (Kant, Hegel ...) or French. The world "lingua franca" was used to describe what English stands for today. America was busted and fallen down, the economy under Hoover (who was called an "engineer, digging deeper into pockets"). They had poor quality cotton (remember, Indian British books - the Deccan plateau had Cotton too & the empire had Daka muslin) and a "department of war". Is from such an amazing period of time, after fax machines, aero planes and Einstein, but before anti-biotics and nukes. But other than as a curiosity, the whole collection has been obsoleted by the 2nd half of the century.
- brennebeck 8y ago
  Do you happen to remember some of the titles?
- rexpop 8y ago
  I don't see how they could be obsoleted. What we know of Rome is very often through late-Roman scholars. We'll need these texts to disprove modern anti-historians, who make claims about our origins to drive reactionary politics. A Roman example--as described in Mary Beard's "SPQR"--is how imperialists claimed Rome was always ruled by kings, attempting to erase its Republican history. Contemporary populations accepted that viewpoint because they didn't have access to history. They're still relevant. Frankly, I am grateful for even your cursory summaries.
- lazyasciiart 8y ago
  What's wrong with the books being about a vanished place? Most classic literature falls into exactly that category - think about Tom Sawyer, or The Great Gatsby. People don't get rid of them.
ArtWomb 8y ago
And yet, due to a myriad confluence of historical accidents, there are innumerable texts which become "de-canonized" with the centuries. And are eagerly awaiting a new audience to once again gain reverence. Consider Caxton's Polycronicon printed at the dawn of movable type, circa 1490. An encyclopedia of universal history, it deserves no less a place on the bookshelf than Gawain, Beowulf or the Mabinogian. But few will make reference to it today. Nor the thousands of other lost texts of the period known as the incunabula, the first half-century of transmission via printing press. A time in history that saw an explosion in literacy and design experimentation. http://www.psymon.com/ http://www.psymon.com/
hondish 8y ago
Yes, Lindy the expert: https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...
sudovancity 8y ago
That final bit, got a pretty good chuckle out of me, thank you

cicero 8y ago

Time does filter out the bad books, and most books that are written fall into that category, but the books that endure the test of time are really good.

chrissam 8y ago

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

jszymborski 8y ago
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.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  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.
  - klodolph 8y ago
    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.
- inimino 8y ago
  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.
  - CobrastanJorji 8y ago
    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.
- kwelstr 8y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_with_the_Night
watwut 8y ago
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.
Diederich 8y ago
I'm pretty sure that Dianetics will survive a vast pile of higher quality books. The overall point remains valid, however.

jolmg 8y ago

Many (probably most) books today suck too. Not to say there aren't a lot of modern, quality books out there, but I think there's a boundless amount of new, bad books.

anongraddebt 8y ago
I discussed this problem with a professor-friend (philosophy of science) of mine. He made two solid points: (1) The pressure and rapidity of publishing - for many authors - means less time spent on individual projects. (2) Your expectations as a reader partially determine your judgement as to how much value a book has. As your expectations increase...
- jolmg 8y ago
  > (2) Your expectations as a reader partially determine your judgement as to how much value a book has. As your expectations increase... I understand this to mean that my ever-improving taste might make it seem like, as time goes by, a greater and greater proportion of books seem to be of low quality. However, it works the other way around, too: As people through new generations become ever more easily satisfied with mediocre writing, the need to produce high-quality works decreases. At least, this is what I think is happening with TV.
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    Good point. I think both can be happening simultaneously.
lscotte 8y ago
And unlike those old publications, there are digital copies now so they won't die the death they deserve. I say it with sarcism, but there's some amount of seriousness in there...
- kijin 8y ago
  At least we have different filters now. Nobody is going to buy an obscure digital book that only has 0.8 stars, and Amazon probably won't recommend it to anybody.

gopalv 8y ago

> I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked. It could be worse - they could be fascinating, but entirely irrelevant to the modern world view. My dad had a cache of books from a friend of his - that was collected from the pre-independence era for India from 1920s to 1945. The world in those books were strange - the era looks like nothing like the world from my text books. The "Great war" had just passed ("between cousins"), there was wistful memories of the Russian empire, of china being conquered by the japanese. Oil empires in Burma (Burmah-Shell), political deals with the Kings of Siam, health of Austro-Hungarian royal inbreeding. The shades of gray in which Belgian kings and Cecil Rhodes got painted as conquerors ,liberators and genocidal maniacs in one go. All the important intellectuals are German (Kant, Hegel ...) or French. The world "lingua franca" was used to describe what English stands for today. America was busted and fallen down, the economy under Hoover (who was called an "engineer, digging deeper into pockets"). They had poor quality cotton (remember, Indian British books - the Deccan plateau had Cotton too & the empire had Daka muslin) and a "department of war". Is from such an amazing period of time, after fax machines, aero planes and Einstein, but before anti-biotics and nukes. But other than as a curiosity, the whole collection has been obsoleted by the 2nd half of the century.

brennebeck 8y ago
Do you happen to remember some of the titles?
rexpop 8y ago
I don't see how they could be obsoleted. What we know of Rome is very often through late-Roman scholars. We'll need these texts to disprove modern anti-historians, who make claims about our origins to drive reactionary politics. A Roman example--as described in Mary Beard's "SPQR"--is how imperialists claimed Rome was always ruled by kings, attempting to erase its Republican history. Contemporary populations accepted that viewpoint because they didn't have access to history. They're still relevant. Frankly, I am grateful for even your cursory summaries.
lazyasciiart 8y ago
What's wrong with the books being about a vanished place? Most classic literature falls into exactly that category - think about Tom Sawyer, or The Great Gatsby. People don't get rid of them.

ArtWomb 8y ago

And yet, due to a myriad confluence of historical accidents, there are innumerable texts which become "de-canonized" with the centuries. And are eagerly awaiting a new audience to once again gain reverence. Consider Caxton's Polycronicon printed at the dawn of movable type, circa 1490. An encyclopedia of universal history, it deserves no less a place on the bookshelf than Gawain, Beowulf or the Mabinogian. But few will make reference to it today. Nor the thousands of other lost texts of the period known as the incunabula, the first half-century of transmission via printing press. A time in history that saw an explosion in literacy and design experimentation. http://www.psymon.com/ http://www.psymon.com/

hondish 8y ago

Yes, Lindy the expert: https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...

sudovancity 8y ago

That final bit, got a pretty good chuckle out of me, thank you