That’s what you’ll see if you scroll down the list of winners of the 2016 PROSE Awards, also known as the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence.
It’s nearly true, but not quite, that I learned that MWA had been chosen when I saw this on the book’s Amazon page:
Scroll down to the bottom of the Amazon page (for which I hope I will never provide a link) and you’ll see the book described as “disorganized” and “snobby.” I had never heard of the PROSE Awards before last week, and I don’t know what they entail (apart from a “special luncheon ceremony” to which I hope my publisher was invited, because they won awards in several categories). So not only do I not know whether or not congratulations are in order (I haven’t received any); I can’t even judge whether or not the award confirms or contradicts the suspicion that MWA is a book of, by, and for disorganized snobs. Maybe some readers can help me out?
As far as organization is concerned, I can assure you that MWA is in fact highly organized, though its structure is not conventional. Packing information from a variety of sources, normally only consulted by snobs, into a small volume, while simultaneously avoiding an infinite regress of cross-referencing and maintaining the illusion that the prose flows naturally, is a combinatorial problem no less challenging, though on a smaller scale, than guaranteeing that the dependency graphs of the Stacks Project are simply connected. When the challenge became too taxing I only managed to solve it, imperfectly no doubt, by retreating to an isolated environment, and with the help of a combination of natural stimulants.
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