Star classification is a type of rating scale utilizing a star glyph or similar typographical symbol. It is 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 used in hotel ratings, with five stars being the highest rating. Historical usage Repeated symbols used for a ranking date to Mariana Starke's 1820 guidebook, which used exclamation points to indicate works of art of special value: ...I have endeavored... 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. The Michelin restaurant guide introduced a star as a restaurant rating in 1926, which was expanded to a system of one to three stars in 1931. Media Books 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