I’m seeing my publisher next week and will try to float the idea with him if people have reasonably concrete thoughts that they’re willing to flick to me via email. If you’re not ready to do that, at least give me an outline - possible directions etc - so I can run the idea past him. If Graham Young is in Sydney I’ll try to get him and my publisher together for coffee or something.

Happy to provide additional publicity through Catallaxy and any other avenues I can organise in the interim.

We’re currently discussing (by email) the possibility of compiling a “best of” list through solicitng nominations from essay-style bloggers themselves (i.e. getting them to nominate their best 2-3 posts), and then convening a judging panel to achieve the best (say) 20 or even 30. We’ve more or less concluded that it’s too late this year to aim at a dead tree version, because you need to hit the Xmas market to make it commercially viable. However your assistance in that regard for next year would be invaluable.

For this year we’re hoping it might be feasible to publish the “best of” list (possibly in an annotated links form not dissimilar to Missing Link) on Graham Young’s Online Opinion (which has a very large circulation) with cross-posting both here and at LP (and possibly at Catallaxy as well if you like).

If he’d published it in any dead tree media, t’would have been a shoe in for BAE 2006. But he didn’t and it didn’t which I think helps highlights the conspicious consumption snobbery of the old print media.

“Oh anyone can write any old thing on the internets. But print has built-in gate keepers, basically because it still costs money to distribute thoughts and ideas. Thank god! How else could we establish what’s worthy of being read.”

I reckon the trick/marketing gimmick here is publish not only the best posts but the threads they inspired as well - albeit judiciously edited to remove all the pointless praise, slagging and bagging.

Laying it out would be a great design challenge as would sorting out the copyright issues over quoting commentators.

Oh well, it was nice idea while I thought of it.

Essays are supposed to be reflective and also durable, unlike most blog posts which tend to relate to transient issues and are off the cuff as Mark said.

It might help to rework them as Nicholas suggested, in fact if writers knew the piece was going to end up there quite likely most of them would have been heavily revised with an eye to posterity!

On the revision, I don’t know whether you’d need some sort of editorial guidelines though - often blog posts are written in a hurry and would perhaps benefit from some editing, but on the other hand the immediacy of the form is an attraction.

To clarify, I wasn’t really too fussed with the truth of falsity of McKenna’s claim he made that fiction was somehow displacing history - I liked McKenna’s argument against Grenville (that’s what I meant by speaking of ‘his case’.

On producing a shortlist for an anthology one way to go would be to ask chosen blog posters (and anyone else who wanted to participate) to send in what they though of as their two or three best pieces and go from there. That would cut down the editorial task of choosing the pieces a great deal.

(Mark B and I once agreed on a swap deal where we would cross post between LP and CT what we regarded as our best posts. I think we might have posted one or two pieces but it never became a regular thing.)

To add something extra, they could be invited to do any reworking they wanted to in the light of the passage of time and/or comments that have been made. That makes it a bit more special. If the BAE people had asked, I would have played around with my essay to improve it a little I expect.

On McKenna, I don’t think he is going on sales figures. The way I’ve read most commentary about trends in book publishing is that non-fiction is trumping fiction.

On the other hand, maybe like Montaigne, his essay is an attempt to try something out. But of course you can’t talk back to an edited book!

I liked the essay too. But what evidence does McKenna cite that the public is placing greater faith in fiction authors than historians to interpret our history authoritatively? Skyrocketing sales figures for historical fiction? Plummeting sales figures for academic historical works? Opinion polling? McKenna mentions none of these things. His sole evidence AFAIK is that Kate Grenville herself makes overblown claims about her own authoritativeness! That may say quite a lot about Grenville, but says nothing at all about the extent to which the reading public has lost faith in historians. (In fact academic historical works, with the exception of Manning Clark’s great multi-volume work, have never been great sellers AFAIK)

On your blog essay anthology suggestion, I note that both Gummo and Laura are musing about doing some such thing over at Lava Rodeo, and have called for nominations. Maybe I could put up a similar post here and make a few tentative suggestions to get the ball rolling, and we could pool the nominations with those generated at LP and ponder jointly over a final list.

I don’t really think I could tackle such a task solo at the moment. As you know, I’ve been fairly disengaged from the blogosphere until quite recently, so any list I prepared would certainly overlook many worthy contenders. Of course, if I keep up the momentum of Missing Link through next year, I’ll be in an ideal position to compile Best Australian Blog Essays 2007. Maybe we could even persuade Black Inc to publish it in hard copy. However, there might well be a significant commercial risk in publishing an anthology whose contents are all available free of charge on the Internet. Perhaps that’s why The Best Australian Essays 2006 largely confined itself to essays first published in subscription-only journals.

I agree with all I’m qualified to - ie with all the essays you comment on that I’ve read. I’d read Robert Manne’s piece in the Monthly. I bought it on the strength of his essay I think. And, though I’m generally a fan of Manne’s I thought it was pretty lame. I’m not a fan of Clive James’ but he does write some good essays. The piece that turned up in the volume was unusually turdsome.

I liked Margaret Simons. I liked the Mark McKenna piece more than you - but then his case seemed pretty solid to me.

But I agree with your main point. They definitely need to get out some more. Drusilla Modjeska’s intro was pretty flip. A bit less than three pages. She comments that few professionals like architects and lawyers, astronomers and physicists write essays of the kind she’s anthologised and then comments that this is (partly) because newspapers don’t publish them. She comments that only one essay comes from a newspaper. Well my essay is an exception to all that - but then I sent mine in.

I can’t point to any essays of lawyers off the top of my head, but I find it hard to believe that there’ve not been some good essays by lawyers this year. They’re a pretty loquacious lot. And the AFR Review (where my piece was first published) comes out each Friday - that’s 52 odd editions a year. There’s usually good stuff in there. Quiggin’s there regularly and often saying pretty interesting things. Why wasn’t Jack Marx’s piece on himself and Russell Crowe in there?

And as you say, there are the billowing riches of the blogosphere.

So why don’t we produce an anthology of some of the best blog posts for 2007? Missing link would be a great place to start. If you can be bothered Ken, may I suggest that you present us your loyal readers with a shortlist and appoint a group to choose the ‘best’ twenty or thirty?

I used to get these things as Chrissy presents a few years ago, but have discouraged people from the practice, as generally they contain nothing good I haven’t seen before and filler trash by big names, like the pieces you talk about in your last para.

I did browse it in a bookstore last week, and the only thing that made me contemplate buying it was Nicholas’ piece - but I’d read that as well courtesy of the Fin Review as well as Troppo.

I think they need to widen the net a lot, as you say.