Books are hard to kill. Books don’t lose anything by being reprinted by a new machine, books are stubborn, they remain the same work of art, they carry the same cultural aura. Emily Dickinson didn’t even publish books, she just wrote these demented little poems with a quill pen and hid them in her desk, but they still fought their way into the world, and lasted on and on and on. It’s damned hard to get rid of Emily Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog’s ear. And everybody who writes from then on in some sense has to measure up to this woman. In the art of book-writing the classics are still living competion, they tend to elevate the entire art-form by their persistent presence. – The wonderfull power of storytelling, Bruce Sterling