“We are sold books the same way we are sold cell phones, as if the latest models deserve the most attention,” complains Nathan Ihara in an LA Weekly commentary …

Each year, publishing houses churn out hundreds of thousands of new titles, including 35,000 works of fiction. The publicity machine goes to work, eager to fashion the rare success. Magazines and newspapers – the ones that still have book sections – chime in with opinions on which new books are worthwhile and why. Newspapers print their “summer reading” lists. The big-box bookstores pile their display tables with glossy stacks of fresh arrivals – for a fee, naturally. A relentless progression of the latest, freshest, greatest. Read this book! But all the middlemen along the way – the publishers, publicists, critics and book sellers – know the truth: The book they are hyping probably is not the book you ought to read, not even the book you would most enjoy reading. That book lies hidden in the back of the bookstore, or perhaps not even there. It is 10-, 20-, 35-years-old. However good it is, no one talks about it anymore.

Ihara says our general literary aesthetic is, as Ezra Pound had it, that “litearture is news that STAYS news.” But in practice, even with older authors still writing popular books, their backlist is often treated as if inferior to their newest, says Ihara: “For example, Ian McEwan‘s first novel, the wicked, brilliant and little-known The Cement Garden deserves as much attention as his grandiose new satire Solar.”

So who’s fault is it that novels are judged by their publication date?

It’s easy to point the finger at the major publishing houses whose reliance on large offset print runs pushes them to publicize each new arrival as an “instant classic” and to urge readers to “forget comparisons.” Newspapers are also to blame. By demanding timeliness from their book reviews, they lock literary discussion to the present…. And, finally, readers themselves are culpable. We want our authors young and beautiful, our novels hip and topical. We are suckers for the concept of progress, eager to believe that today’s novel, against all logic, is superior to yesterday’s. Perhaps the system is not even broken, perhaps we are getting exactly what we want, or at least what we deserve.

Nonetheless, he observes that new technology could counter this:

The Internet has made it so that old reviews and rare titles are now easily available at the click of a button; Amazon‘s preference algorithms bypass the single-mindedness of the display table to unearth literary treasures suited to your taste (“You may be interested to know that Knut Hamsen‘s Growth of the Soil Vol. 2 is available.”); the lively world of web litblogs, free from the pressures of journalism, promote books from all time periods (for example, the online literary magazine thesecondpass.com offers spirited reviews of older works) and neglectedbooks.com contains essential gleanings from our literary amnesia; and the rise of eReaders and the iPad eliminate printing costs, making it possible for publishers to sell easily across their backlist.

All of which, he suggests, could help reorient readers to what Pound’s dictum was all about: “Roberto Bolaño‘s Savage Detectives and 2666 became recent literary sensations, not because they were new, but because they were new to us.”