from my Commonplace Book . . .

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A word of explanation: A commonplace book is a collection of excerpts and quotations that strike whoever keeps the book as worth saving. It's like a diary that contains not one word of one's own. Today's entry is notable chiefly for the date when it was written.

Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes--certainly our fathers were not afraid of essays. Nevertheless, somewhere about the opening of our own day, an iron-bound tradition became erected in the publishing business, at least in the United States, that books of essays would not sell; could not be made to sell even sufficiently to avoid a considerable loss on the investment of manufacture; in fact, were quite impossible as a publishing venture.

     -- Robert Cortes Holliday, 1923

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