Sure, this New York Times article (via Bookslut) shows that Knopf has passed on a lot of authors over the years — Borges, Orwell, Kerouac, Sartre, Nabokov — but does it really prove anything, much less that these rejections were blunders? I mean, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and history is littered with bestselling and award-winning novels that originally nobody wanted to publish. But just as often, if not more frequently, it’s full of the opposite. And just because a book finds massive success with one publisher, that’s no guarantee it would have found the same success with another, or at another time.

You see the same thing with movies. Did you know Doris Day reportedly turned down the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate? Or that Nick Nolte turned down Indiana Jones? Heck, there’s a whole site full of these things! But does anyone honestly believe those would have been the same movies with different stars attached? Why should books be so different?