The anxiety of influence

We are lucky to live a short walk from the Whetstone branch of Columbus Metropolitan Library. I was there a few months ago browsing in the literature section. I was interested to see the strong presence of Harold Bloom. There were both books by him, and collections of critical essays he edited.
I mentioned this to Thom the next day, saying that it seemed to me that there was a collection development oversight here and that the Bloom influence on the overall literature collection was too great.
A little while later, Thom came in to show me the list of top authors (ordered by volume of library holdings), which was later used to generate the cloud on Worldcat Identities. And, hey, there was Harold Bloom right up there. There are a lot of libraries with a lot of Harold Bloom books! He demonstrates really remarkable reach and range!
I notice that in his nice note on Worldcat Identities, Tim O’Reilly also remarks on the presence of Bloom in the cloud.