Words of wisdom for fiction selectors

Last week, after going through the usual difficulties and runarounds of ordering a book from a small publisher with less-than-customer-friendly ordering practices, I finally received my copy of The Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith. I opened it at random and found a letter from CAS to August Derleth which included the following paragraph:

April 9th, 1931.

Dear August:
[...] I feel the way you do about O'Brien [editor of an anthology of "The Best Short Stories"]. I once tackled one of his anthologies, but was unable to get very far with it. The tales chosen were damnably arid and dry-as-dusty -- which in my opinion is the general characteristic of fiction in the supposedly "better" magazines. I have come to the unconventional conclusion that the despised "pulps" are almost the only ones that ever print anything with any freshness and vitality. The middle-class "smooth-paper" magazines are full of a tame and padded romanticism, and the "quality" publications seem to want nothing but social satire and a sort of dead-sea-apples realism. I'd rather read W.T. [Weird Tales] at its worst -- or even Adventure.

I'll certainly look forward to H.P.'s new story. I hope he'll write a lot of them....