A horrible misunderstanding of Ford Madox Ford

So the Campaign for the American Reader has a website called The Page 99 Test, which is headed by this quotation:

"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." --Ford Madox Ford

No source is given, so I don't know the specific context. Elsewhere, somewhere in his eccentric literary history The March of Literature, I think, Ford describes his "page 90 test", which I paraphrase as follows:

Pick up a new book. Turn to page 90. Read the first full non-dialogue paragraph. Judge accordingly.

The point of the test is to get a sense of the writer's prose, just the prose. The reader doesn't know who any of the characters are, or what's going on, and page 90 (or 99) is far enough in that mediocre writers have let their guard down. "Non-dialogue", because decent dialogue comes cheap. Ford was a literary editor, and was swamped with books. This was his method, an aesthete's method, a writer's method, of culling.

Not every reader cares about the quality of prose. There's no shortage of evidence for this proposition. But good prose is what Ford means by "the quality of the whole". Is the book well written?

I was surprised, then, to discover that at each post on the Page 99 site, a single page of a book is discussed by its own author. They tell us how page 99 is "representative" of their wonderful book. Many of the authors don't include a single sentence of their own work. Many others should not have. Strangely, not a single writer says that their prose is so poor that their book isn't really worth reading.

So the whole thing is just puffery. Trivia, marketing, probably best ignored. Is the Campaign for the American Reader a publisher front organization? Ford's long dead, I know, but please, leave him out of it.

The Campaign's home website tells me that it wants "to encourage more readers to read more books." I want to encourage more readers to read better books.