Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors.

It was one of the realities of publishing: what was truly new often languished in the warehouse nearly unasked-for. One of the tricks of publishing was catching the wave of public taste at the right moment.

Most of the smaller houses had been gobbled up by so-called general-interest publishers, most of them now owned in turn by much bigger conglomerates who’d publish anything they could get their hands on that had a chance of making money.

For all his profanity and bedroom antics, though, Homer was a relative prude when it came to misbehaving on the page.