Michael Orthofer: preference

Transcript context

…That can’t be true. You may not have articulated your system. But I saw you in the Strand. You have rules and principles. You turn the corner at a certain time. You know what sections to go to. Right. It’s a very personal selection process, I think. I think it’s whatever information works for you. One source of information, for example, is seeing what imprint has published — a certain publisher. If New Directions or New York Review Books has brought out a volume, you know possibly what kind of book this might be. That helps narrow it down. Used-book stores — you have to be familiar with the older imprints, for example, which just takes a lot of practice, I guess. That, for example, is one of the sources of information. It’s very difficult, I think, to narrow it down. I think that’s one of the wonderful things of going in a bookstore and of being willing to take a chance and pick up something that hasn’t been shoved down your throat, hasn’t been recommended in 15 different publications, because the offerings out there are so rich that you can really find many things just at the extremes. I once did an experiment. I went into a bookstore, and I said, “I’m just going to pick out the book whose cover I like the best and put aside whatever other impressions I might have of that book and really see this through,” just to see how good of a predictor that would be. I ended up liking the cover of a Kate Christensen novel. I then liked the novel, and I’ve liked some of her subsequent writing. When it comes to covers, covers are there, in a way, to trick us, but there’s also a kind of matching going on. It signals, maybe, how intellectual the book is or what kind of person should buy or read that book. You see a cover. How do you decipher or decode the information there? If you like the cover, does it sway you?…

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