Quote of the Week

"Too often when a publisher entertains an author at the midday meal a rather sombre tone tinges the table talk. The host is apt to sigh a good deal and to choose as the theme of his remarks the hardness of the times, the stagnant condition of the book trade and the growing price of pulp paper. And when his guest tries to cheer him up by suggesting that these disadvantages may be offset by a spirited policy of publicity, he sighs again and says that eulogies of an author's work displayed in the press at the publisher's expense are of little or no value, the only advertising that counts being -- how shall he put it -- well, what he might perhaps describe as word-of-mouth advertising."
- P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Dynamite (1948)