‘Where are all my favourite parts?’ Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica symphony. ‘Oh, there they are. In the tiny notes.’ The tendency of many people, presented with the overwhelming abundance of an art form, is to exclude as much as possible. Reduce the wonderful life of incidental invention to the tiny notes; erect walls excluding the fascinating curiosity, the eccentric, the madly idiosyncratic. Produce a list of the 100 Best Books, sticking to declared Greatness.

People have been producing lists of the Best Books for a hell of a long time. When copyright law was reformed in 1774, it enabled publishers to produce collections of novels for the first time. James Harrison’s multi-volume The Novelist’s Magazine was the earliest, presenting Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Charlotte Lennox, Eliza Haywood and Sterne as the classics of this new genre. (He also included Edward Kimber, the Revd Dr Dodd and John Shebbeare, and only Robinson Crusoe of Defoe’s novels.)

The tyranny of Pride is coming to an end

I don’t need a lecture from my chocolate bar

J.D. Vance is right about Henry Nowak’s death

The publishing of collections continued, with what often seems to us eccentric choices. Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library in the 1820s removed most women novelists and Defoe altogether. Sometimes selecting an author for Greatness required editorial intervention. Anna Barbauld’s The British Novelists, from 1810, was the work of a highly intelligent writer and commentator. She included Maria Edgeworth’s wonderful Belinda, but the romance between a black servant and a white English girl was removed. That was not compatible with Greatness.

These collections did a lot of good, as energetic and opportunistic publishers often have done. When Richard Bentley bought the copyright in Jane Austen’s novels for his collection of classic novels in 1832, she was a middle-ranking author, out of print. Bentley secured her path to........

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