Pretty interesting. There's obviously a lot of selection bias, but there seems to have been a lot of uncertainty about whether these famous books would have even been published, and even more about whether they would have become famous. In several cases: (Lolita and On The Road for instance) he credits single prominent reviews for bringing the books out of obscurity.

He claims "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" got twelve rejections before being accepted, and that by the time the second book had been published, Rowling had received only £2,800 royalties and a £1,500 advance for the first. At the celebration lunch the publisher warned her "You'll never make any money out of children's books, Jo."

Gekoski predictably feels that rare book collecting is a more elevated activity than lesser forms of collecting, being more a form of scholarship. He seems to have felt a certain sense of shame at including Tolkien's academic gown in his book catalogue, and didn't repeat it.

Overall, pretty worthwhile if you're interested in books. Each article is self-contained so it's a book that could be dipped into. Worth a look.

Museums
Went to see the Painting of Modern Life exhibition at the Hayward, a roundup of paintings of everyday life from the Sixties onward. (Warning: suckiest flash website since skipintro.com)

As you'd expect, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the Sixties paintings just literally re-paint news photographs and magazine covers, thus artifying the everyday: this seems to be just another retread of R Mutt's great joke, already fifty years stale when they were painted; and another four decades hasn't made it any fresher.

Some of the paintings from photographs are even more annoying. They repaint crap family snapshots on large canvases, brutally exposing the flawed compositions, stiff poses and bland clichés: doesn't seem to mean much except "gosh, we artists are so much better than those dopey plebs, aren't we."

However, I was very impressed by some of it. Marlene Dumas' "The Visitor" is another painting of a photo, this time of Nevada prostitutes lined up for a customer: always a popular scene for 20th century painting as in the "Demoiselles d'Avignon", but I think this is the first time I've seen one painted from their point of view.

Also liked several of the Johanna Kandl paintings. One labelled "Venice, 2005", shows the enormous rectangular bulk of a modern cruise ship the "Carnival Liberty", with a stern security notice warning the public to keep 50 meters away, docked with a crowd of handbag salesmen scattered in the foreground. It's definitely Italy as we see it. Also liked "Love it or leave it" though it's very didactic: a Belgrade shanty town with tour buses and gleaming skyscrapers just beyond.

Franz Gertsch's "Aelggi Alp" is impressive through sheer size: a group of friends sitting, but on a huge canvas like a Victorian history painting.

Big name-wise: couple of Warhols, couple of Hockneys, but not much else.

Overall then, quite a lot of interesting stuff there, worth a look. £8, not crowded, moderate child count. Observer, Guardian, Times.

Web
So just how do celebrity academics get the time to balance their research with their media careers?

Just who wrote the "Footprints in the Sand" poem?

Video: train goes through Bangkok market. Audio: Nine Inch Noels

Long articles. US war on drugs. IQ.

But this created a dilemma: if genes were so dominant, how could IQ gains over time be so huge? Unless you thought that there was a large genetic upgrading from one generation to the next, large intelligence gains should be impossible. Yet they occurred, which implied that there were environmental factors of huge potency. How could environment be both so feeble and so potent?

The Dickens/Flynn model resolved this dilemma. Two twins raised apart, thanks to having slightly better genes than average, would both get into increasingly privileged environments. Both would get more teacher attention, would be encouraged to do more homework, would get into a top stream, and by adulthood, they would both be far above average. Moreover, thanks to their identical genes, their environmental histories would be very similar. Their identical genes were getting all of the credit for the combination of identical genes plus nearly identical enriching environmental factors!