Take a big, black permanent marker and remove all the names from all the fronts of all the books you own. Right now. Then come back and carry on reading.

Did you do it? If you did, you’re a much less cautious person than me; I’d have finished reading the article before taking such drastic action! Moreover, I would have read the article with an eye to answering the question, “Why?”

When we read a book, or look at a painting, or watch a film, we are doing so in a context. Often that context is, fairly explicitly, the other works of that author (or artist, or film director; we’ll stick with the word ‘author’ for the general argument). Watching Michael Mann’s Collateral, I compare it to Heat. Reading The Castle, I compare it to The Trial and The Metamorphosis.

In doing so, we’re not evaluating the work on its own merits, purely judging it against the other films we’ve seen or books we’ve read; when we’re disappointed by a band’s second album it may still be good relative to its peers, just not as good as their debut.

Worse yet, getting bound up with the work of a particular author, our tastes can become coralled. I might wait eagerly for the new Haruki Murakami novel or Ridley Scott film, instead of searching out books or films by authors unknown to me. A system of merit where a novel (or any artwork) rises or falls on its own merits—not on the reputation afforded by previous work or a fashionable name—is fairer. Such a system better serves the fact that the artwork, not the author, is the atomic unit of art.

This suggestion is, of course, hopelessly impractical: the current system is too deeply embedded, human beings too conservative, authors too egotistical. Moreover, the ability to search by author is simply useful; you can go to a bookshop or a library, check under A or J or W, and find other books by the same person, affording a better chance that you’ll enjoy the book you buy or borrow than if you simply picked one at random off the shelf.

So, since it’s not going to change, why bother writing this at all? Well, hopefully it’ll help me—and maybe people who read this—to reconsider the basis on which we discover, judge and appreciate art. Erase the names and engage with the thing itself.