A friend of mine to whom I also sent the article replied with this: <<I can't pinpoint the market for this book. Specialist scholars will disdain it. Graduate students will snub it. Undergraduate courses cover too much ground to allow focus on a single poem, and the undergrads will use Cliff Notes, etc., instead (or, in this comic-book-movie age, the Classics Illustrated version). I suppose the publishers are aiming for institutional sales and sales to poetry and lit lovers. I would estimate that no more than 5 to 10 thousand copies have been printed.>> I guess I, too, have trouble trying to identify the primary marketing target group for this. Julie Krueger On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:36 PM, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>wrote: > > > On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> >> >> Paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare has Hamlet say: "For there is >> nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." >> > > Is pandering the issue here? Or a service to readers like the provided by > the famous Loeb editions of the classics in which an English translation is > on facing pages across from the original Greek or Latin? Or, perhaps a > better example, like my edition of the Four Classics, which includes > extensive footnotes and a modern Chinese translation as well as the original > classical Chinese? > Why, I wonder, have we leapt to the conclusion that the work in question is > intended for classrooms? Might it not be a scholar's gift to fellow > bibliophiles, who will welcome the opportunity to compare his, apparently > deeply expert, take with their own? > > John > > -- > John McCreery > The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN > Tel. +81-45-314-9324 > jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx > http://www.wordworks.jp/ >