Jacques Barzun? Morris Philipson? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: There are several roles in the domain of publishing. A prominent thinker has asserted that writing “is the most difficult of all to learn”. The thinker also said writing is “at least a craft and at its best an art”.
These remarks have been attributed to French-American historian Jacques Barzun and U.S. publisher Morris Philipson. I have not been able to find a citation. Who do you think deserves credit? Would you please help?
Reply from Quote Investigator: The answer to this inquiry reveals an intriguing misquotation mechanism. The quotation of interest was crafted by Morris Philipson who was the Director of The University of Chicago Press for more than thirty years. Philipson wrote the foreword to a collection of essays by Jacques Barzun titled “On Writing, Editing, and Publishing: Essays Explicative and Hortatory”.
The quotation appeared within the foreword, but QI conjectures that a careless person looked only at the name of the main author of the collection and assigned the quotation to Barzun. Here is an excerpt from the foreword by Philipson. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
Publishing, being a business, offers the most objective conditions for teaching and for evaluating how successfully the trainee is learning his job; editing, too, less sharply defined but seeking to be a profession, offers some opportunities for knowing whether one is learning one’s trade; but writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult of all to learn.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
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