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Originally Posted by whswhs
The way that Connoisseur is defined, it's primarily useful to look at things—in the case of literature, stories and poems—from the perspective of critics and the cultural elite. Its effect on buying and selling is secondary: +1 to Merchant skill.
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I'd be wary of taking that wording too literally. There
are connoisseurs of bubblegum pop or romance literature, and similar fields which still have image problems among the cultural elite, even in the debased postmodernist age; there needs to be a skill for them. Likewise, connoisseurship of, say, fine ales is an authentic skill, but it puts one at a tangent to most concepts of cultural elitism.
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So I would say that what you use to run a bookstore, or pick potential best sellers, or be a literary agent is Merchant (Literary Works), possibly helped by Propaganda or Fast-Talk. Some people will go for Connoisseur skill and the extra +1; others will just buy up the core skill—they won't know anything about "literature" but they'll know what readers will buy.
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The trouble with handling such things entirely in terms of specialised Merchant skill is that it makes unspecialised Merchant skill insanely broad. If someone with Merchant (RPGs)-14 or Merchant (Wine)-14 has specialised knowledge of those fields, someone with plain Merchant-14 (for a whole point more) must have the same knowledge of those and every other saleable topic, by the definition of optional specialisation.
I prefer to think that Merchant is about the art of buying and selling whatever you have and knowing how to get a basic idea of its value in advance. Dealers and brokers in specialised fields (fine wines, comic books, exotic slaves, orchids) also need specialised skills to know whereof they speak. Most people at the sharp end of the business will have those skills, though the theory behind recruiting high-level management from outside an industry is that high-level management has and needs only high levels in Administration and Merchant, and doesn't really need the specialist skills. (Scott Adams has built a career out of knowing where that thinking can lead, but it may not always be BS.) But a PC being defined as a dealer in a specialised field will usually need more than Merchant to work in play.