As far as books are concerned the public is barely able to sit up and take a little liquid nourishment. Solid foods don't interest it. If you try to cram roast beef down the gullet of an invalid you'll kill him. Let the public alone, and thank God when it comes round to amputate any of its hard-earned cash.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
13 June 2017
Advice to Booksellers and Publishers
Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1920), p. 40: