The old historical paradigm, writes Krzysztof Pomian,“directed the gaze of the historian towards extraordinary events, historians resembled collectors: both gathered only rare and curious objects, disregarding whatever looked banal, everyday, normal'.* What changed the situation, Pomian goes on, was the shift" from exceptional events to the large mass of facts' introduced by the Annales school, and the present article tries to imagine what would happen ifwe, too, shifted our focus from exceptional texts to “the large mass of [literary] facts". It's an idea that occurred to me some years ago, when the study of national bibliographies made me realize what a minimal fraction of the literary field we all work on: a canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows—and close reading won't help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century