It is no easy matter for a teacher of aesthetics to make a choice among the many textbooks now available in that subject. I have been looking at fourteen books of “readings” in aesthetics, all of them in English, and all but one of them published during the past twenty years. Three were published within the past six months: how many more will arrive before we have to settle down to work on another choice?

There are two main reasons for this proliferation of anthologies or books of “readings”. One reason is that it is almost fatally easy for a busy academic to prepare an anthology rather than to write a book. Deans and presidents are as much impressed by the book a man edits as they are by the book he writes, although they are achievements of two very different levels. The other is that aesthetics is currently big in the booming textbook industry, and every commercial publisher wants a title on the subject in his catalogue.