Star rating

Stars are often used as symbols for ratings. They are used by reviewers for ranking things such as films, TV shows, restaurants, and hotels. For example, a system of one to five stars is commonly employed to rate hotels, with five stars being the highest quality.

Repeated symbols used for ranking date to Mariana Starke's 1820 guidebook, which used exclamation points to indicate works of art of special value:

...I have endeavoured... to furnish Travellers with correct lists of the objects best worth notice...; at the same time marking, with one or more exclamation points (according to their merit), those works which are deemed peculiarly excellent.

Murray's Handbooks for Travellers and then the Baedeker Guides (starting in 1844) borrowed this system, using stars instead of exclamation points, first for points of interest, and later for hotels.

In 1915, Edward O'Brien began editing The Best American Short Stories. This annual compiled O'Brien's personal selection of the previous year's best short stories. O'Brien was known to work indefatigably: he claimed to read as many as 8,000 stories a year, and his editions contained lengthy tabulations of stories and magazines, ranked on a scale of zero to three stars (representing O'Brien's notion of their "literary permanence.") At the end of each book, O'Brien listed all the stories published during the preceding year. O'Brien awarded no stars to those stories which failed "to survive either the test of substance or the test of form." O'Brien listed these stories without comment or a qualifying asterisk. O'Brien awarded one star to "those stories which may fairly claim to survive either the test of substance or the test of form. Each of these stories may claim to possess either distinction of technique alone, or more frequently, I am glad to say, a persuasive sense of life in them to which a reader responds with some part of his own experience." O'Brien awarded two stars to stories "of still greater distinction" that warranted a second reading "because each of them has survived both tests, the test of substance and the test of form." O'Brien awarded three stars - the highest rating - to "a small group of stories" which had "an even finer distinction—the distinction of uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with a spiritual sincerity so earnest, and a creative belief so strong, that each of these stories may fairly claim, in my opinion, a position of some permanence in our literature as a criticism of life. O'Brien further listed these stories "in a special 'Roll of Honor.'" In this special list O'Brien further attached an additional asterisk to those stories that O'Brien personally enjoyed. "Stories indicated by this asterisk seem to me not only distinctive, but so highly distinguished as to necessitate their ultimate preservation between book covers. It is from this final short list that the stories reprinted in this volume have been selected."

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