singing that old Mississippi Sheiks song, “Pencil Won’t Write No More”

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

Yet—often in error, never in doubt—the golem never forsook the arrogant delusion that they could predict and manipulate the consumption of the masses; and, no matter how wrong their own balance sheets proved them to be, the unseen bureaucracy seemed not to question this delusion. Those who bore the title of publisher or editor or both, who once had stood above the golem, were now pressed to serve them. Every book that they wanted to acquire and publish now had to be slutted to fit the paradigm of the golem’s delusion. It had to be presented as a product whose nature was of a tried and true formula of current marketability. It might be labelled “daring,” in the manner that detergents and oral-hygiene products may be labelled “new and improved” or even “revolutionary,” but, like those detergents and oral-hygiene products, regardless of label, it must be consumer-safe, with tested and approved artificial fragrances and colors. It may be “shocking,” “brutally honest,” “outrageous,” “wild,” or “nightmarish,” as these have become the acceptable flavors of mediocrity; but, while being “shocking,” “brutally honest,” “outrageous,” “wild,” or “nightmarish,” it must never be offensive or aberrant, nor must it venture in any way beyond the pale of the petting zoo of the accepted.