Sphinx

Very many years ago, when I was writing up my PhD, I was hired by an eminent ancient historian to do some preparatory work for the publication of a volume of their selected articles, including making recommendations on which of their numerous important contributions should be included. The utterly rubbish nature of my performance in this task can be deduced from the fact that said volume didn’t appear until years later, thanks to someone else’s work, with no trace at all of my efforts, and generally I try not to think about it too much because of the embarrassment. But reflecting on the experience does raise some interesting questions today.

The central issue (among the central issues…) was less my incompetence and more a radical divergence in views about what such a volume should be. My basic thought process, reviewing these decades of scholarly output, was along the lines of: this article is seminal, but it was published in JRS so everyone knows it already, whereas this one is almost as good but completely obscure, so that definitely needs to go in the volume. In musical terms – because why the hell not? – I unthinkingly approached the task as a fan, focusing on b-sides and rarities that offered a complex, multi-faceted view of the artist in question, whereas it became clear that what was really required was a blockbuster Greatest Hits with detailed liner notes.

I’m still not entirely sure that I was completely wrong; but then, Sci-Fi Lullabies is my favourite Suede album, and I own all the Bob Dylan Bootleg series… Okay, there are relatively few historical Dylans, whose incidental jottings and abandoned experiments would still find an eager market (Syme? Momigliano?). On the other hand, how many historical Eagles or Madonnas are there, whose work will sell to a load of people who don’t already know the classic numbers? Surely most of the people likely to be interested in such a volume would indeed already be familiar with JRS pieces?

Of course, it’s possible that I’m making a category error in imagining this to be a commercial project at all; insofar as the publication of a Collected Articles volume is better understood as tribute and celebration, the obvious thing is to include the pillars of that reputation, i.e. the biggest, most familiar and influential hits. It’s a mark of status simply to be given a Best Of compilation, and it’s perhaps easier to justify this if the collected pieces already display their quality through their original place of publication.

Do things look different today? I am now conscious of having made an enormous assumption in the work I did for this project that every likely reader would be based at a university and so have access to things like JRS – my focus was on the fact that not every likely reader would be at Oxbridge so wouldn’t have access to the more obscure stuff. It is now the case, I think, that anyone in a North American or Western European university has access to an astonishing range of resources, probably including all the stuff that would have counted as obscure twenty-five years ago – it’s the world of Spotify, rather than HMV, so to speak; at the same time, as I’ve commented before, there are very many places in the world that don’t have (legal) access to any of it.

If we go back to the musical analogy for a bit: it’s now possible to dig back into an artist’s entire oeuvre or to explore the whole development of a genre, relatively easily, but the sheer volume of stuff that’s now accessible has created a space for curated playlists and the like – in academic terms, the rise of themed collections of articles, companion volumes and detailed bibliographies.*

That seems to leave a space for primers in the work of particularly influential artists/historians, though I can imagine a continuing tension between readers wanting a handy compilation of key works by X on a specific theme and X wanting to showcase the breadth of their interests, without being allowed multiple volumes in which to do this. And the number of important pieces that appear in edited volumes, that are less likely to be available in digital form, means there is still an important role for the Greatest Hits format – the recent Keith Hopkins Sociological Studies in Roman History III does precisely that task of making accessible a couple of widely-cited but not easily accessed articles.

I do wonder about these issues from a personal perspective; not that I’m likely to produce such a volume, both as being insufficiently eminent and important and as having far too miscellaneous interests to produce a coherent collection, but in thinking occasionally about whether there would ever be scope for a tidied-up anthology of stuff from this blog, or whether its easy accessibility online means that anything else would be utterly pointless (though Ruth and Martin’s Album Club managed it…).

More concretely, as I continue the very slow process of making old publications available via this blog, it occurs to me that the obvious approach is to ask what, if anything, any of my readers would be interested in reading. Yes, I need to update the Publications page with more recent stuff (and I do feel I need to respect reasonable embargos), but otherwise do feel free to make requests in the comments…

*Note to self: at some point, must get round to annoying people by claiming my much-maligned compilation of Key Quotes in Ancient History as the invention of historiographical sampling, so to speak…