“Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a wilful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality.” And yet, “Don Quixote was a big bestseller when it first appeared in 1605, and has continued to sell ever since.”