In 1974 William Morrow published Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. According to Pirsig, 121 publishers had rejected it. His editor wrote that the book was not “a marketing man’s dream.” It sold about 50,000 copies in three months and more than 5 million in the decades since.
The book asks what Quality is: “Quality . . . you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is.” Early on, the narrator describes repair shop mechanics who worked with the radio playing. “They were like spectators,” he writes. They were “involved in it but not in such a way as to care.”