Talk:George Robinson (bookseller)

A fact from George Robinson (bookseller) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 21 May 2020 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the bookseller George Robinson paid Ann Radcliffe £500 in 1794 to publish The Mysteries of Udolpho – equivalent to £58,735 today?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2020/May. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/George Robinson (bookseller).

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 20:43, 16 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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Article history

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... that in 1794 George Robinson paid Ann Radcliffe £500 to publish The Mysteries of Udolpho, equivalent to £72,558 in 2023?
Source: JoEllen De Lucia, “Radcliffe, George Robinson and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture: Beyond the Circulating Library” in Women's Writing, vol. 22 (2015), Issue 3, pp. 287-299

- ALT1:... that a fellow bookseller called George Robinson “the Prince, nay, the King of Booksellers”?
  Source: William West, Fifty Years' Recollections of an Old Bookseller (1835), p. 92

- ALT2:... that Thomas Longman, liberally and unasked, offered fellow bookseller George Robinson ”any sum, on credit, that might be wanted”?
  Source: John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3, p. 445

Reviewed: NW Rota-1

Created/expanded by Moonraker (talk). Self-nominated at 09:41, 25 April 2020 (UTC).[reply]

Article creation date versus filing date is five days, okay. Article length at filing time was 1960 B (333 words) readable prose size, now is somewhat more, okay (the sizing tool excludes the list of books, so the article is actually a good deal longer). Article neutrality good, sourcing good, no evident signs of copyvio. QPQ done well.

Regarding hooks, all are neutral and have AGF sourcing. I'm not crazy about any of them in terms of hook interest though. To me, the most interesting line in the article was A radical, in 1794 Robinson published Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, ... What about subscribing to the ideas of Radicalism (historical) (which should really be linked to, given that many modern readers may not know what 'radical' means in this context) made Robinson want to publish this Gothic exemplar? Were other publishers rejecting the work on account of looking down upon the Gothic genre? Or is the point that Robinson was willing to offer more money for it than other publishers? I think this could be explored a bit more in the article, and then an ALT3 hook could be based upon that.

Other comments: Why is "(bookseller)" used for the disambig phrase in the article title? I would have thought "(publisher)" a more important designation ... but it's okay with me either way. Regarding "who liberally, and unasked, offered him any sum, on credit, that might be wanted", it is not clear who is saying this – if it is Nichols again, that should be briefly indicated (I'm happy to see that the other quotes in the article are attributed , however). There is an extra blank line after the first paragraph in the article body. You are using curly quotes instead of straight quotes throughout, any reason why? And you use (inconsistently) slanted quotes in two of the three hooks. Note that for some reason the closing curlies are backwards in a few spots, such as in notes 1 and 4 and the first entry in Further reading. The MoS would say to replace all these with straight quotes. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:13, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wasted Time R, so far as I am aware, DYK does not require strict compliance with MOS. If I am wrong, please quote the rule. I use the quotation marks my iPad creates, but please do feel free to dive in and improve on them. Here is the DYK guidance on reviewing hooks. The tests to apply do not include whether you are “crazy about” a hook, that’s a much higher barrier than whether a hook is “hooky”. You can’t be the reviewer and also propose different hooks, because then a new reviewer would be needed. The reviewer needs to review the hooks on offer and say whether they fail to comply with the rules. On your comment on ALT2, if you look again you will see that Thomas Longman is making an offer which is then quoted. Moonraker (talk) 13:25, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I review DYK's in the spirit of what can make the article better, given that it is going to appear on the main page (and in many cases is going to become the most visible explanation of a topic in the online world), not with respect to the letter of the DYK requirements law. Some contributors appreciate this and some don't, I get that, fair enough. So nomination is approved.

My preference among the hooks is for ALT0, although as I said I don't think it has as much hook interest as it could have. As for ALT2, it reads to me like it is supposed to be a direct quote of what Longman said to Robinson when he made the offer. But "any sum, on credit, that might be wanted" are actually author Nichols' words (p. 445 mid), paraphrasing what Robinson often recollected Longman doing for him. Wasted Time R (talk) 14:06, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]