Patron-funded scholarship may produce better books than mass-market publishing

Evidence

Since few books published on the Middle East could hope to recoup their costs in sales to the public, a subvention from a patron was usually a necessity. As the historian David C. Douglas has written of the slightly later period: ‘It is very easy to ridicule the circumstances that attended the private patronage of letters in the early years of the eighteenth century, and the fulsome compliments of contemporary dedications have nourished the self-satisfaction of an age which prefers the flattery of a large public to the delectation of a patron. But hasty writing designed to extract money as rapidly as possible from the largest number of pockets is not necessarily a better means of producing good books than the effort to please the exigent taste of a cultured and wealthy class.’ — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 151

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the buyer-of-neglected-scholarship theme in The Library: A Fragile History, and to the general economics-of-knowledge thread running through the reader’s notes on patronage and print.