Call them the last members of the Addison DeWitt school of criticism: gifted prose stylists with nothing to declare except their talent, a combustible mixtures of connoisseurship and populism (when it suited them), who saw in their own presumption of a common reader an echo of the studio's own connection with the popular audience.
To a common reader, the world of book dealers revolves around a mystery: how can they bear to let their prized objects go?
So how can we track the development of Virginia Woolf's "Common Reader", of the late 20th century through his, or her, serial engagements with books?
The two most common readers of your cover letter are the recruiter filling the opening and the hiring manager.
Dr Zack Busner's quest for the meaning of the past as he awakens his "post-encephalitic" patients in 2010 with a new wonder drug will severely test the patience of your average common reader, some of whom will declare it unreadable.
To say that the result isn't what the common reader expects of a novel is not to question its fictionality, which is absolute, or the author's imagination, which is vivid and exact.
Hill has made brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest to him.
Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in The Common Reader (1925): While a Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, Michael Goldman presented his view on defining the elusive quality of Chekhov's comedies stating: "Having learned that Chekhov is comic... Chekhov is comic in a very special, paradoxical way.
All this seems fine, and a volume that might help quicken the common reader's sense of excitement and purpose would indeed be a valuable one.
These sentiments seem to turn his poems into hymns, and he is one of the rare modern poets who appeal equally to the literary avant-garde — William Empson analyzed "The Windhover" in "Seven Types of Ambiguity" — and to the common reader in search of spiritual sustenance.
The critic may not know who these readers are, but their existence seems indisputable, and the crystallization of the common reader changes the function of criticism in precise ways.
