“In 1931 Macmillan published a book by an unknown English writer named Louis Arnaud Reid. He was attached to the University of Liverpool and his book was called A Study in Aesthetics. Few people read the book then, and although a book club adoption of the reissue in 1954 widened its circle of readers, I see no signs that its ideas have taken hold of the general mind. Reid is as unappreciated in the United States as is Collingwood. Yet Reid’s Study should be the bedside book of every critic and every amateur of the arts: it is the only work since Santayana that expounds a philosophy of art while giving evidence that the little three-letter word is to the author a living reality. And Reid’s aesthetics is the more catholic and truer of the two — a remarkable performance.” Jacques Barzun, Outstanding Books, 1931–1961