There was the St. Louis Post Dispatch, “Turmoil over the book price war took a new turn today when the Justice Department was asked to investigate what a booksellers group called ‘illegal predatory pricing’.”

The New York Times, “(Reuters) The American Booksellers Association has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a recent price war on books sold online between such retail giants as Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Amazon.Com Inc and Target Corp ahead of the holidays.”

The Washington Post noted, “The plot really began to thicken Monday when Target got into the game. It also began selling eight of the books offered by Wal-Mart for $8.99. Not to be outdone by its chief competitor, Wal-Mart on Tuesday beat Target’s price—by a penny.”

And the Wall Street Journal said, “Wal-Mart triggered the online skirmish Thursday when it began selling the 10 most anticipated hardcovers for $10 apiece when pre-ordered on its web site. Amazon matched the offer hours later and Wal-Mart then chopped its price to $9. Friday morning Amazon had matched the price.”

Ha. The good old days. WAR! Civilian casualties to be counted later.

While too many of my fellow booksellers and authors are asking for the government to step in and stop the madness before every one of the last small independent bookshops in the country are bankrupt and only the dinosaurs roam the earth, I would like to point out a couple of things to the contrary.

This is happening just because the government has already stepped into the business arena and made it possible. Any correction the government makes will only serve the interests of the giant retailers—they can afford the lawyers who write the laws. The only thing which can correct and solve this problem, as well as a thousand others in at least as many businesses who suffer under the same onus, is for the government to get out of the protection racket, otherwise known as corporate law, which makes all of this possible.

My own small shop had to endure this sort of thing back in the late 1970’s when the chain stores first moved into Boston in a big way. We lost a major part of our new book business and had to scramble to survive by filling our shelves with lower priced used stock. This is not an option for most inner-city booksellers who must pay exorbitant rents driven by tax codes which squeeze commercial property. Only the stock turnover in sales possible with new hot titles makes paying such rent rational. Take away the hot titles, and you have an unfillable maw.

It is corporate law created by lawyers and politicians to serve their own needs which makes it possible for a company that pays taxes in Delaware to open a store in Boston and run it at a loss for five years in order to drive all local competition into the ground, while covering the losses with the profits from stores in California. This is neither Constitutional nor moral, but it has been done since the lawyers for John D. Rockefeller designed the anti-trust laws that permitted him to control Standard Oil even as it was being broken up among various states in the interests of so-called ‘anti-monopoly’ politics.

This is not ‘free enterprise’. It is state capitalism. It is the bete noire of fascists. It is the way Hitler controlled the industry of Germany. And now I hear my well-meaning friends in the booktrade howling. “Something must be done. The government must help us.”

Haven’t the war machines of the Twentieth Century taught us anything? The answer is not blowin’ in the wind with the smell of burning books.

All of my rants about the death of the book are made moot by the larger context of the political powers which are at play here. Amazon does not care about books–Mr. Bezos’ best intentions aside. It cares about price points and self-preservation. I need not say a thing about the Wal-Mart—Target–Costco mentality that is not already known by anyone who might read this.

I do not expect the best outcome here. Most of the independent new book stores and local chains in Boston died in the eighties. My shop struggled through that by living on the edge for too long and thus we were finally unable to survive the doubling rent increases of the 1990’s.

I do not expect to hear any major voice saying that it is time to tackle the lawyers. They run the show. Corporate law is what it is. And we will be paying the consequences until the war consumes us all.

I was recently asked to contribute to the Powells Books (Powells.com) website as a guest blogger for the week of Monday, October 19 through Friday the 23rd. I was quite pleased to do it. The idea of a new audience of potential readers at this moment when my first novel is just out was a great opportunity.

But then there were choices to make. Should I pick a different subject each day or carry a theme. Should I be light or jump headfirst into those darker thoughts that plague me.

In the end I chose to write on a single theme, the death of the book, but avoid my worst nightmares for the sake of some degree of polite conversation. After it was done, I thought it came out fairly well. No loud ranting. No dead bodies.

Powell’s has kindly given me permission to repost my entries here and I have decided to put them all up at once in consecutive order.

1. The Death of the Book Is Not Exaggerated

Because I write this from Indianapolis, where I have been attending this year’s Bouchercon (the world crime and mystery fiction convention) I will begin with a bit of argument I usually save for later in my general thesis concerning the death of the book…

Sadly, most of the people attending looked like me–old and white…Okay, older, but still white. And though I know many younger readers of the mystery genre, they are the minority, and they are still white. Sitting in the audience and looking over the gray hair toward the podium where many fine authors were expounding on wonderful aspects of a genre which has been special to me since I was a teenager aspiring to be a writer myself, I could not help but be aware of the mortality of so many of these folks so devoted to their field they are willing to spend hundreds of dollars during a recession just to attend a gathering of fellow mystery lovers in this fine city with at least one great eating establishment (the Rock Bottom Brew Pub. I recommend the hickory burger and the house brown ale).

Understand, it is not their fault that they are either old, or older (I’m 62) or white. They were born that way. The problem is this: when they are gone, what then? When a new generation is raised on libraries without books, and instant news gratification, and text which is so fungible it leaks before your eyes, what then? And all this, when many cultures, not only elsewhere on this small earth, but right here in Indianapolis, have not yet even established the traditions of respect for the printed word which propelled Western culture for five centuries.

And this feeds into my greater worry–the cause which made me choose to write this series of mysteries in the first place. The book may not yet be dead, but it is mortally wounded. I have been preaching this line to deaf ears for years. The new technologies, others say, will not replace the book, but will only share the space, and enlarge it for all. Sure. Like the automobile did for the horse-drawn carriage. No. Not like that. More like the Cro-Magnon replaced the Neanderthal.

My thesis is that any such comparison does not apply. Before Gutenberg’s book, only a small elite could read–was permitted to read–and text was so expensive only the wealthy could afford the pleasure. A scare-house Halloween mirror version of this is what I fear most. After the book is gone, everyone will be able to read, but what they read and how they read will be determined by a few. A faceless few. An anonymous bureaucratic few.

I chose to write a mystery not to write a polemic about the death of the book (all part of the death of the bookshop, and the newspaper, etc), but to make a point of the mortality of this love I have for something mankind has done right amidst all the things we have gotten wrong. The book is a holy thing to me, and reading a pleasure and a gift I wish on everyone.

I have been a publisher and an editor of books and magazines. I once participated in the actual printing of a small school journal from movable type on a letterpress. I have designed pages and pasted them up. I have developed the advertising and marketing of publications. I have been a book rep traveling from city to city. And I have been a bookseller–this is the way I have earned my living for over thirty years. Now, I am a writer of a book, with others written and waiting their turn.

Not coincidentally, I chose as protagonist a ‘book hound’ whose devotion to books has afforded him a refuge and a living, whose comfort is shattered by the murder of woman–a friend and a former lover, but someone he is not sure he loved. This doubt, and the fact that he himself is both a suspect and a witness, compels him to find the cause of her death. Once shaken, he is awakened and can no longer sleep. Not to make too much of the metaphor, this is in kind with the death of the book itself. We take it for granted and assume that its blessings can be moved to a digital being. It won’t be. This wonderful device on which I write now and the magic software that makes it possible, is more fragile than any but a few are willing to recognize.

I don’t fear the Kindle or the Sony Reader, or the iPod, or any new device. They are wonderful in their own right. But we cannot let them replace the book.

There are many other worries attached to this, of course. I have been talking about this for long enough to make a few books out of it, at the very least. I will touch on a few over the next few days as I recover from my first ever convention.

2. A Practical Matter

Exaggeration is not necessary.

It was in a letter of 1897 about his cousin James Ross Clemens, that Mark Twain famously noted “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” He managed to hang on, despite his critics, for another thirteen years. Times were slower then. I suspect that the death of the book will occur more rapidly, though the small corpses will be with us for a bit longer.

What is poorly understood here is actually a very practical matter. We have lost the steel industry in America, once the largest such in the world by far, in less than forty years. That took place for very practical reasons. But if you had said such a thing was possible in 1960, you would have been looked at as a fool. And General Motors is too big to fail…right? It may not be as visible from 30,000 feet but a car trip through Detroit, or Buffalo, or any of a hundred great American industrial cities will tell you how quickly things can change.

The printing industry is just that, an industry, though miniscule by comparison to the making of steel. And this goes for publishing as well. Is there any reason for the center of publishing to remain in New York—one of the most expensive places a poor author must visit? Not now. Not in the age of the internet.

Even with a still small and captured market, the downloading of books onto Kindles and the like is already a half-priced convenience. But what will it be like in a few years. Even the machine that is a ‘reader’ will be made somewhere far far away from New York.

In an age of digital ease and the reduced ‘cost’ of those ephemeral 0’s and 1’s, can you think of a compelling reason why ‘publishers’ will promote the work of ‘authors’ who ask for too much? The need will be for product. The publicity and marketing departments have long ago assumed control of the editorial reasoning for what will be acceptable at the larger publishing houses.

Those same publishers who dominate what you can find at Walmart and Costco, (or any of the other ‘convenience’ stores that make the existence of independent book stores a daily struggle) are not in business to lose money. And like the pulp authors of the 1920’s and thirties, working in a medium which had then used technology to reduce the cost of publishing to a bare minimum, the price per word will fall even for the most popular authors. Can you tell me why those same publishers will want to keep alive a ‘format’ which they consider too expensive and too difficult to distribute relative to a nearly instant electronic impulse?

I cannot.

But I know this. That what happens to the reader engaged by the artful nuance of typography on a paper page while exploring the imagination of a single writer is not the same as the collision of visual information offered by the illusions on a digital screen.

I know this, that reading a book is an experience of human scale, not only proportioned to the hand but to the mind. It was made that way by the genius of Aldus Manutius and Wynkyn de Worde and tens of thousands of artisans and artists, writers and even editors (yes, even editors) who came after them.

And I know this. That if I find the original edition of a book, that it is at least what the author meant it to be, or nearly so in that contest between an author’s accepting payment and the need to pay for a meal or a bed. What you find on the screen is only what is convenient.

And this: those 3 ½ inch floppies you kept all that poetry on which you wrote in college won’t work on that lap top you bought last week. And what you have on that flash drive you carry on a string around your neck will be an artifact as useful as the tooth your ancestor once wore the same way.

You must understand this: everything we know as a civilization, good and bad, will soon be an ‘Aleph’ that even Borges could not imagine. And it can and will be lost in an instant.

It will be a practical matter.

3. Omnium Gatherum

In the October 17th issue of the Wall Street Journal there was a provocative piece concerning the new Kindle 2, by Stephen Marche who often writes for Esquire. In essence he accepts the revolutionary potential of the Kindle and proposes a new word, the ‘transbook,’ to describe the device and its cousins. I find the more humorous intonations of an ‘Omnium Gatherum’ to be appropriate. I suspect his optimism and suggest he has his historical facts out of order and incomplete.

Mr. Marche happily describes the moment in history when the ‘Kindle’ of another age was introduced: the codex. This wonderful device replaced the scroll–a single roll of paper–with what was essentially a bound volume of scrolls and was in fact the first true book, bringing to an end the tattered isolation of specific and shorter hand-written texts. This was revolutionary, indeed. What he fails to mention is that this was the very device which was used by authority to do away with the anarchy of the individual scroll, which might be produced by just any apostate who could write, and created the opportunity for organized sanction and approval (as well as improvement) of texts. The books of the Bible were thus codified by imprimatur. Heresy could thus be stamped out. It made the Pelagians among us very unhappy.

This was, in fact, the great and profound change that brought about the ‘dark ages.’ The authority of the Catholic Church was supreme and all dissent had to take place within the confines of its rule.

Mr. Marche recalls the monk Johannes Trithemius as a Benedictine scholar of the sixteenth century who opposed the printing press. He even compares him to our contemporary Nicholson Baker and that author’s recent rants against the Kindle and its kin. But Mr. Baker’s argument is more than just ‘the feel of the paper.’ Mr. Baker is a free man in a relatively open society who is worried over the further diminishment of his world, not its enlargement. And Trithemius was an occultist who recognized in the printing press the end of a more secretive society. His proto-Hogwarts School was an effort not only to garner knowledge but also to control it.

Mr. Marche then bemoans the heavy personal burden of accumulating individual volumes and the convenience of having 1500 titles in one relatively small device. He suggests a future where the ‘transbook’ will provide access to “all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in and out of ‘print’” He says, “its about what the book wants to be.” It seems to me that this is the language of the true occultist, giving anthropomorphic power to a machine.

The reality is that the ‘transbook’ will be the tool of particular interests, and with particular interests. The industry that currently produces the book will fade away, at first slowly, but then at a quickening pace, as its economic underpinning are kicked away. The cost of a single printed book will rise. The convenience of downloading text will overcome reservations. Copyrights will be re-written to serve the new paradigm. And texts which do not meet the approved standards of language, or political purpose, will be neglected and unavailable.

This condition already exists to a lesser degree. First amendment protections are already being restricted for literature not in ‘book’ form. ‘Hate speech’ is proscribed and defined by standards which suit the political interest of the moment. Criticism of certain religious faiths is outlawed as ‘bigotry’. Specific words are forbidden and removed from texts. For those who agree with a given prejudice being exorcised, all is well. But the open society suffers. The great Nat Hentoff has been warning us about this for decades.

How is it that we are to avoid this bowdlerizing castration of our literature when all text is under the immediate electronic thumb of ‘authority.’

In How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman the marvelous reach of the law of unintended consequences was described. The poorest country in Europe in the Seventeenth Century was torn by the Presbyterian reformation of John Knox. In the fervor of their beliefs, the Kirk fathers wanted every man, woman, and child to learn to read and thus have direct access to the word of God. Overlooked was a related consequence, having learned to read, every man, woman, and child would be able to read anything they chose. Within a hundred years Scotland was the richest country in Europe, and the home of thinkers who had spawned a revolution in America and were creating the industrial revolution in Britain. Could this great awakening work now in reverse as all books are contained in a single dispenser?

Never mind the impermanence of costly devices which will be outmoded within a few years, or the restrictions of software intended to meet restrictive purposes. I would have far more confidence in the future of the e-book if it were guaranteed the same freedom of the press as the printed book. Sadly, political forces are already active on the behalf of special interests. The new money is on the Kindle, and this too leaves me in doubt.

4. Apple picking

And then we have the op-ed by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, in the October 9th New York Times, which praised and defended the concept of Google Books—essentially the planned digital access to all the world’s literature. I recommend anyone interested in the subject of books, copyrights, and the integrity of text to read it.

I read his comments with horror and began immediately to write an essay on the subject for my own website. Sadly, I would wager that at the very least, nine out of ten people who read Mr. Brin’s editorial will think that his efforts are for the good and offer a whole new future for the written word.

A few weeks ago I stood in a grassy field where I had been picking apples while a major book illustrator paged through his portfolio of dozens of successfully published covers and hundreds of projects. His portfolio was in his hand on a device made by Apple. He also had the text of the books he had illustrated there as well, and numerous reference works he had made use of.

How could I not be impressed by this wizardry held in the palm of a hand? Well, let’s see…Perhaps I should highlight a few things Mr. Brin said in his article.

After mentioning Cornelius Walford’s account of the destruction of great libraries through the centuries, he said, “I hope such destruction never happens again.” Ironically, and I believe unintentionally, Mr. Brin’s previous and current efforts are part of the actual destruction of millions of books right now. Today. This minute. Libraries from coast to coast are ridding themselves of their troublesome books and replacing them with machines and software. The good intentions aside, all of that machinery and software will be obsolete within ten years. I know that as an historical fact. I cannot now access things I wrote on my Mac ten years ago.

Additionally, one might ask, what is the software platform which will be mandated to access Google’s efforts? But that would be picky and perhaps offensive to the software engineers at Microsoft.

And, given the rights to the world’s literature, will Google be writing off the enormous cost of their effort and giving equal access to all other search engines? Not likely. Mr. Brin even says as much while suggesting that by leading the way, Google will be making it easier for others to follow. I suppose,.. if you have a spare billion to spend.

Mr. Brin refers to “a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores” as a ‘black hole.’

Funny, I never noticed I was in a black hole all those years of my life spent at Avenue Victor Hugo Books, my small shop.

Mr. Brin does not even attempt to touch on the greater issues. Who will choose the works to be available? China, for instance, has already made it clear they will not permit access to what they do not like. Access is limited in all Arabic speaking countries. Who will oversee the texts? How will you know what you see is what the author wrote? Where will you go to check the text?

And something more, as alluded to here in a previous posting: is reading a Kindle the same as reading a book? Does the mind approach the electronic page with the same sensibilities? I can answer that by way of a personal note. I have arthritis in two fingers (having been a two-finger typist from childhood). I can no longer use a mechanical typewriter, despite my fondness for the machines themselves. More importantly though, I can say without doubt the way I write has been dramatically altered. I even think differently about the way I construct a sentence. Simply put, the ease of choice made in the instant as one writes has altered the way a writer crafts his work.

I don’t wish to be totally negative at this moment of small triumph for myself. I have beside me my own first book! But these larger matters have already affected my life, and they will be with us for all the years of my children, and their children.

Every age encompasses the end of another and the seeds of the next. That is exactly what my novel HOUND is about. It is most importantly about a final moment in human history, but it is also asking what is to come after. The old world, in all its aspects, has been my life. But Henry Sullivan, my protagonist, is younger than I am and thus is straddling that cusp. This story and those which follow are about a book hound, a man who finds good books–as I see him in my mind, a sort of knight errant and this series of mysteries as his sallying forth to do battle on behalf of the things he loves.

I am not Henry Sullivan. He is far smarter and braver than I have ever been. His worse limitation is that he only knows what I know. Thus he has quite a task ahead. He must first come to understand the threat his world faces. Then he must find out why. And then he must do something about it.

Understanding the threat that Mr. Brin poses to the life of the book is obvious. What can be done about it is not. Certainly technology will move in the direction of demand. The usefulness of the Apple iPod is just as obvious, and the demand is terrific. Finding a viable place for the book in a world of instant amusement will be difficult. But that is my purpose.

Now I have a book of my own. And if I can entertain a few more readers for a little while longer and thereby keep my world alive, I will be very pleased with what I’ve done. But I will not be satisfied with that.

5. Truth and Consequences

The challenge of making my case in these five short blogs is magnified for me because I am both a slow talker and thinker. I tend to work toward my thoughts in an ‘organic’ manner. That’s probably why I chose the form of the novel for expression. I am not easily seduced by sound bites.

The first line of my novel, HOUND was hidden until my editor pointed out the old newspaper adage that I was burying my lead. Yet it was that first line that had spawned the whole book and had always been the nucleus of the way I was going to approach my larger subject.

Books are, after all, the way I make my living.

It is a matter of our age that most of us refuse to deal with unpleasantness until we are forced to. There are so many alternatives. Buy a new one. Eat out. Watch TV. Download it…A significant number of my fellow citizen live their lives between a pair of headphones. It’s damn hard to hear the screaming that way.

We have thrown off the clothes of tradition and taken up the amusements of our age. Neal Postman warned about the consequences of this in Amusing Ourselves to Death, many years ago.

I was not surprised in the 1990’s to discover that my worries over the death of the book were dismissed out of hand by most people. What occurred to me then was that the whole process of recognition would be either organic or catastrophic. Nothing in-between. Now that the dying has begun, what I hear is denial. It won’t be so bad. You won’t feel a thing.

Telling people over and again that the levees are inadequate, that money to fix them is being misspent on other things, and that history has predicted a direct hit by another hurricane in the foreseeable future, is not enough, though homes and lives and the life’s work of hundreds of thousands are at risk. Afterward there will be many to blame. But there will be very few who admit, “I knew, but I did nothing.”

It is your right to go in a candy shop and spend all your pay on sweets. It is your right to put the work of your life on a flash drive. I am not asking for or wanting any government to tell you or me how to live our lives. What I am wanting is for as many people as possible to take responsibility for themselves and what they do. I don’t want my children to bear the consequences of a society which has lost its head. Go ahead, buy the candy if that’s important to you. But please don’t turn then to your government to correct your health problems because that cost will then fall on me and mine and I do not deserve the burden. I am certain I have made enough mistakes all my own to bear.

Dependency on the convenience of the internet is not a good thing. Yes, it will be a wondrous good to have all of the world’s fine literature (and the trash too) at your fingertips as Google wishes. But if you stop making choices—if you stop buying the actual book which represents your own judgment about what is fine, there will be no true arbiter of taste. There will be no true arbiter of value to separate the fine from the trash.

The book must share space in the rooms of our lives. We must make that judgment in numbers sufficient to keep the book alive and viable as an art form, and a business, with all the craft and industry behind it. What I fear at first is neglect. No one wants to do harm. But later, when the cost of the book has risen too far above the expense of the simple download, all that will be left is the kind of ‘print-on-demand’ that will homogenize and pasteurize every nuance of the arts and crafts of publishing. And with them will inevitably go content.

Already typography and binding have suffered.

I haven’t the scientific background to instruct others on the fragile nature of the internet, but I fully comprehend the consequences of what I have read and been told by those who do. For instance, the effect of a single electromagnetic pulse weapon above New York would end most modern communication in America.

I could ask, “How are your letter writing skills? Penmanship anyone? And is the Post Office up to the challenge of physically carrying all that love texting today.”

But that is not the point. Doomsday is not the real matter at hand. Such warnings will be ignored, just as we have ignored them so many times in the past. The truth is that whether or not any catastrophe ever befalls us, we will have lost a great tool of civilization.

The book is the record of what we are. And this medium does not occur in nature. It is just as artificial as the iPod. It is a product of the human imagination. And just as the iPod is the end product of a thousand smaller technologies without which it could not exist, the book too will go away if the infrastructure that makes it possible is neglected.

The record of what we are should not be left in the hands of a few. Just as the codex took the place of the ancient scroll and thus permitted authority to assume control over what we should know, the internet and its offspring are liable to central management. They will have their own purposes in mind, whether their hearts are good or bad.

We must take care.

A short but excellent article in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Johnson does the service of touching on a few of the key elements in the ongoing murder of the book. They would be called clues were the crime not committed in plain sight and to the indifference of those very witnesses whose lives and fortunes will be most devastated by the loss.

I imagine the death will be mourned much like that of a rich uncle whose testament has yet to be read. The gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts will not occur until later, when it is discovered that Uncle Octavo has squandered his fortune in recent years and there is nothing left for his various relatives or wives, much less his children, legitimate or not.

Let us look at the evidence.

There have been many articles of late on the coming of the electronic book. Mr. Johnson very wisely proffers some more subtle forensics, but most of the others have the gosh-wow of a kid in the 1920’s who has built his first crystal-radio. Oh, how the world will change! And I would hasten to add, the world did not change enough to keep that kid off the beaches at Normandy in 1944.

The first new new internet was the system of canals that enlarged our lives starting around the 1820’s. By that time, mankind had traveled on roads by foot, wagon, and coach for many thousands of years–roughly at the speed of conversation from ear to ear. One terrific change caused by the canal was the rise of New York City publishing at the hub of a new age. Railroads came along shortly after–much like wi-fi has followed cable–and increased the importance of New York as the intellectual center of the universe.

Electricity brought with it the genius of the telegraph, the teletype, then the telephone. The radio was quickly overshadowed by the television. Through all of this, the book maundered the results. Gatsby played his phonograph, the literati danced, while in the alcove by the potted palm, Prufrock, martini in hand, warned of the hollowing of mankind. And, nearby, the butler could be seen with a candlestick entering the library.

The threads which held the bindings through the centuries have been pulled in favor of a cheaper glue. The sturdy cloth covers that replaced the extravagance of leather have now become mere cardboard. The paper of the text itself is re-cycled–acid free and ready to be recycled again. All of it is disposable now. Books warp and buckle on the shelf without being read or even handled.

And what of the contents in the library safe? The jewelry is paste–mostly post-modern costume artifacts. Words are now adjusted to suit the occasion. If a word bothers you, it can be banned. If an author does not stay on topic, he won’t get a slot on the talk show.

It is time for the e-book.

It’s time that the author be dethroned in any case. Who are they, after all? Just products of their time. Their words might well have been spoken by any other. Their ideas are borrowed, are they not? They are just the latest product of an imperfect educational system. Where they differ, it is only a matter of prejudice.

It is time for the e-book.

Truth is only relative. Offending passages can be digitally removed. ‘Facts’ can be enhanced to suit the moment. And who will be the judge of that? Or is it just that–the truth has no relatives.

Who will save the Earth from these troublesome books? Recycle them!

It is time for the e-book. Have you got one yet? It can be read on the subway, or at the park. All the books in the world are in your hand. All the intellectual power of Rome! No need for libraries. No need for bookshops. No need, in fact, for books.

Technology has triumphed. No longer is the screen bleached by the brilliance of the sun…But neither is it graced by the glimmer of quiet revelation as the eye meets the word in ink on a page.

Mr. Steven Johnson refers to the book as “dark matter.” Yes! Precisely. The tens of millions of books that have shaped our culture will now be burned into pixels of light.

Mr. Johnson is clearly smitten with his toy, but importantly he has paused to ask some questions. His wariness is perhaps caused by a glance at the toys of yesteryear filling the back of his closet shelves.

As the great Google digitalizes text and makes each passage of Moby Dick available sentence by sentence, and word by word, what place will be left for Ishmael? Will Isaac be the only survivor instead? Choose your own text, and Melville be damned.

Mr. Johnson notes: “Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article–sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.”

Willy Loman might have warned, “Attention must be paid.” But with attention spans being reduced to a mere click, is it necessary to read the part about the whaling industry? Can’t I just go right to the good parts? Are you bored yet?

Will writers write so that readers can play tag with the gems and ignore the settings? The heroin of one climax after another will make the marijuana of Proust rather passe, don’t you think? Or is there time to think when there are so many links to follow? The great Google will lead us to an answer.

And when the electricity fails and the lights go out, what? Was the candlestick to hold a candle, or to bludgeon?

The theme of the Hound is the death of the book. It seemed an obvious concept to me at the beginning: to use the lives of individuals faced with this cataclysm as a means of revealing its true magnitude.

I made several false starts before realizing a problem. The simpler the theme, the more difficult the story.

And certainly, writing a book to present such a theme is inherently ironic. But then irony is a part of the human comedy–as it is in the catching of whales, Ahab might have said at the last. More to the point, the game is afoot. The murder is happening now.

I have already mentioned here, in ‘The Hound and its consequences,’ why I chose the mystery genre. However, there is one thing I did not say before on that subject, because I thought it was too provocative to put forward without explanation: I do believe the book is actually being murdered. It’s a subject I will return to at a later moment.

My original hero was a bookseller. Well, of course! Casting myself in the John Wayne role was only natural. Wasn’t it? Maybe not. Besides, John Dunning and more than a few others had already planted in that field.

I turned then to a natural second choice: an author. But books about struggling authors are a bit common. There is too much real angst there to permit an unbiased view of the larger struggle. So I tried making him the great success–the author who had already achieved fame and fortune and was now faced with the consequence of his ambition. This is something I could imagine very easily, but actually knew nothing about. I am one of those angst-ridden strugglers, after all. It didn’t feel right.

What was I to do?

I tried a few variations. I had cast an author’s agent as a villain in my first go at it. Though she lacked the handlebar mustache, she otherwise fit the caricature quite well. Trouble was, the more I tried to make her human, the more I liked her.

So I asked myself, “Self…What would Nevil Shute do?”

This is a wise maneuver for any author but especially for me. Shute, the simple master, is my real hero. My writing is nothing like his in style, I know, but very much in his shadow (in my own mind at least)…And he’d find that very funny. His modesty was overwhelming. I don’t believe he ever had the pretensions of being a stylist or litterateur or casting a shadow except in the shape of his small plane on a landscape far below. He was a great storyteller who went about his task with the joy of an engineer and with the efficacy of a pilot–both of which he was.

You might say, shouldn’t that be the efficacy of an engineer and the joy of a pilot. And I would say yes, that too. But I know the joy Shute took in crafting his stories and cannot escape the knowledge that to Nevil Shute Norway, engineering was a calling. As an author, he crafted his stories like fine little machines–taking neither ‘little’ nor ‘machine’ in any pejorative sense. For a near perfect example, you must read Trustee from the Toolroom.

So I asked my question.

The answer was given in due time, as it always is in a Shute novel. There is no rushing it.

What I wanted was someone who made their living at the fringes of the book world and might examine all its aspects with a degree of independence–like a pilot above the landscape. I did not want to lay blame as much as discover it. I did not want be unfair with such a great wrong and place the onus on anyone other than the guilty. I wanted the kind of forensics which are not found in a one-hour television show.

My wish is that the Hound will entertain sufficiently for me to tell the whole story of Henry Sullivan and his discoveries, but I came to understand that I could not faithfully tell the tale in one short novel in any case. More than that, I was not about to sacrifice the telling of his adventures on an alter of speed, a key weapon in this heinous deed.

There are plenty of suspects in that mob which is destroying the book. I think it is worthwhile to consider them all in their own place.

And if the pace of Henry Sullivan in his sleuthing does not suit the audience, it will be on my own head, not on Nevil Shute. He is my mentor, but not my accomplice. I am on my own in this.

The Christian Science Monitor asked me to write a short piece on bookselling back in 2002. The context at the time was the continuing struggle of our small business to survive the tides and vicissitudes of our age. There were and are hundreds of articles easily findable on the internet about the difficulties of bookselling–even a few I have caused to be written–but at that time I had been working on a poem about the ‘Perfect Bookshop’ and though a poem was not what the newspaper wanted, I decided to rework the effort into a prose statement on the subject. The result can be found here: www.csmonitor.com/2002/1108/p11s01-coop.html (The perfect bookshop weathers the storm).

I have put aside my hopes of re-establishing a bricks and mortar bookshop for the present. Not from a lack of interest or desire. More from the chastening of financial realities and the physical strain such an effort would call for. Still, I dream of my bookshop at night–sometimes in the day as well. I am a bookman at heart and soul. Most of what little I have learned that is not commonplace is about books and bookselling.

The thought arises with the question, “would I ever do it again?’–what would be my perfect bookshop now? Not a fantasy shop of all my best wishes and intentions, but an actual shop that might stay afloat on a sea of troubles. It’s more than a single essay could encompass, but I would enjoy the process of defining the possibility out of the vagaries of my still persistent dreams.

When I started the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in 1975, I had been selling books from a pushcart on the street for several years and doing a lot of dreaming–unrestrained by realities I had yet to encounter. For instance: if you choose a spot because the rents are low, it is likely the foot traffic will be correspondingly small. You must have insurance, and insurance must be paid every month or quarter–period (there is no friendly person at the other end of the phone line who will give you a dispensation just because they like books). Employees have their own worries and troubles and don’t respond well to delayed paychecks.

Almost as overwhelming is the body of literature about bookselling which advises very specific approaches to the business based on hundreds of years of hard won experience and the mundane facts of publisher’s discounts, profit margins, and promotional costs, without ever mentioning the physical needs of food and sleep, much less sex. Sex is, after all, a big part of bookselling. Didn’t you know?

And politics. In our age, politics seems to trump almost all the senses–especially common sense.

My own history is a case in point. I am a libertarian. Libertarians are an ancient political sect with an absolute antipathy to slavery and an equally stringent belief in the golden rule. In other words: don’t tell me what to do, and I’ll treat you with the same respect with which you treat me. Along with my love of fiction, poetry and history, I sought to be a resource for libertarian literature when I started my shop. About twenty percent of my very limited funds for book-buying were guided by this political want. It was disastrous.

There are not enough people who even know what the word ‘libertarian’ means much less the interest necessary to carry such an expense. Given the unusually large student audience in Boston, and the prevailing academic political ideology of our times, had I chosen instead to be a conduit for socialist literature I might have found some success. But politics often trumps clear thinking.

I still believe that any business must be guided by a prevailing philosophy, but I should have restrained my desire to proselytize beyond my love of literature. It was bad enough that I was insisting on carrying a substantial weight of poetry–a section everyone wants to see in a shop but few make use of. Even fewer people read the likes of Karl Popper or Friedrich Hayek, than poetry. When the Random House rep came in he used to shake his head at me, not merely as a fool, but for the terrible waste of effort.

What saved us the first few years was science fiction. We sold more of that than any other. Science fiction and mystery amounted to about half our total income. Another quarter of our expenses were covered by the classics. The paperback revolution of the fifties and sixties was just ending, and almost any great work was still available brand new for just a few dollars.

The other salvation was something done out of necessity and in total ignorance. I was then as I am now a habitual buyer of used books. To fill out the sparse shelves as my budget for new titles ran out I brought in most of my own collection. These were my favorites–Nevil Shute, Raphael Sabatini, Robert Louis Stevenson, C.S. Forester, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Mark Twain, Harlan Ellison, George Orwell, Flannery O’Conner, Raymond Chandler, Elmer Kelton, Frederick Brown, Frederick Manfred, Arthur Conan Doyle, and a few hundred others. And we sold them quickly. My collection of old Blue Book magazines disappeared in a few weeks. My Argosys were gone in days.

I found my way by doing what worked and was comfortable. We sold back issues of Playboy magazines until my older daughter began to wander the aisles. I had a sudden epiphany. We sold comic books until about the same time. Whatever your own perfect bookshop might be, it must meet the measure of your own life. You can’t be doing something you wouldn’t want other’s to do. And you can not be selling something you would not be proud to show your children.

So, given what I have learned, what would I do? Quidnunc?

Firstly, I would have to ignore or control my fear of technology. If the internet has actually made the physical book into a door-stop, all my conjecture is moot. I must befriend the reality far enough to make it useful without being used by it.

Secondly I would have to ignore or control my worry about politics. If the public wants to control my business and tell me what I can sell, all my conjecture is again, moot.

Thirdly, I must set a budget. How much might I have to spend? More importantly, what would I want to spend? Whatever else I conjure, I’ll have to cover the cost of it for at least a year or two. It generally takes a business about three years to establish itself. Income from the first two years might pay for a third. A little debt financing might be helpful. (A kind and equally foolish relative perhaps?)

Let’s figure out what I might need.

Books. Shelves. Space. Time enough.

Being omnivorous, I would like to have books in most categories. My priorities would be fiction, history, biography, poetry, drama, and the arts. I suppose I am rather fond of essays as well. And I must have enough of them at a price to sell and make a profit.

Shelving is best made of solid wood. Forget metal or the composites (more on that later). When you have figured what your budget might be for books, you will be able to calculate how much shelving you’ll need.

The space must be adequate for the shelving itself and the room between the shelves for two average human beings to pass without incident or the necessity of intimate relations. My proposition that sex was a part of the perfect bookshop was not made with consideration for narrow aisles. And the cost of this space is relative to the location, the location, and the location–with an allowance for utilities.

The time you will need is dependent on the time you think you have, multiplied by a factor of at least two. Whatever time you cannot cover yourself will have to be covered by others. They will want to be paid reasonably for their effort.

When you have estimated the last three elements, you will undoubtedly go back and recalculate the first. After all, whether rent is ten dollars a square foot or 100 dollars a square foot, is going to alter your conception of the books you carry. If you want to run the store on weekends only, you can’t cover the cost of prime real estate during the rest of the week.

Remember, the proposition here is for a ‘perfect bookshop.’ Not a money mill (as if any bookshop could be that.) This is an ideal as envisioned by a bibliophile. A book lover. Remember. There is sex involved.

(to be continued)

I met a man the other day. Not a great man perhaps, but at least a very good one, I can tell you. Cyril P. Foley played first class cricket for Cambridge (right-hand bat, right arm slow), fought in the Boer War (Jameson Raid), was a crack shot, enjoyed auto racing, fly-fishing, tennis and golf, went on a serious search for the Ark of the Covenant (the Parker Expedition), spent twenty months in the trenches of France and Salonica without leave during the Great War, liked to play the tables at Monte Carlo, and wrote a wonderful memoir about a world long vanished which is filled with incident while never telling a story about himself that is not at his own expense.

Great men seldom have time to write their memoirs, and good men usually refrain out of modesty, but thankfully there are some of those who have a talent for words and realize they were present when things happened that are worth remembering.

Lieutenant-Colonel Foley’s book is the kind of thing that makes bookselling worth the trouble. The man died in 1936, but he’s alive today for anyone with the time to read. He called his book Autumn Leaves and you can meet him there yourself if you go to the trouble of tracking a copy down. A sturdy reading copy should run you less than $30. [note: I’m out of copies myself or I wouldn’t post this right now. I don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking well of a book just to sell it.]

My own copy was once the property of Captain Horatio James Powys-Keck, Cyril Foley’s dear friend, and another legendary cricketer, and that’s a story in itself. And that too is one of the best secondary pleasures of buying used books–meeting their previous owners on the way.

The problem is that few people really do read anymore. This is a fact difficult to recognize in an environment buried in words. But the closing of one more bookshop is testimony to this. The absence of lunchtime browsers was a fact. The disappearance of evening crowds was real. The drop in book orders can be easily charted.

The failure of my shop is undoubtedly the result of my own foolishness compounded countless times a year, over the almost thirty years we managed to survive my mistakes. The blame is certainly mine for being unable to adjust to the shift of popular habit. But some fundamental things have changed in those years, and this has resulted in a loss far greater than one small business.

When, in the late Seventeenth Century, the ministers of the Scottish Church decided as a matter of national policy that each man should be able to talk directly to God, with no intermediary, it meant that every man, woman, and child must learn to read, so that they could see the word of God for themselves, and thus have something to discuss. In 1680, rock barren Scotland was one of the poorest and most illiterate nations in Europe. In one generation, literacy became common. The Scotland of Adam Smith lay directly ahead.

Naturally, a person who can read might read anything. The Scottish Enlightenment transformed the world. The American belief in education did not arise from the Puritan stocks and chains. This country was blessed one more time by the law of unintended consequences as the English depopulated Scotland to make room for sheep.

There is a common misunderstanding which has been long promoted by our schools. All cultures are equal, ergo, all cultural values are equal. It’s not true. The very fact that you may read this today is the result of a cultural value not common to world history nor even to most of the people alive today. The freedom to read this essay is unusual, even though the specific skill of reading is not. And this value is now endangered by carelessness, irresponsibility, and ignorance.

A common belief today is that almost everyone in America can read. Anecdotal evidence contradicts this. Stand on any corner and see how many cars actually stop, instead of simply slowing down. The sign does not say, ‘slow down.’ People can, perhaps, read, but they do not. They often choose not to. They cannot take the time to stop.

The good of reading is inherently in taking the time to comprehend the words and discuss them–with yourself if no one else. Taking the time to think about an issue or an event and consider it in the light of another opinion or someone else’s memory results in realization if not revelation. We are not perfect. Did you know that? Our individual memory is flawed. That’s why there are twelve people on a jury.

Reading a book is a discussion between the reader and the author. Taking the time to read is inherently an understanding of the value of discussion and argument as well as seeing the context of events and issues beyond your own narrow field of vision.

When I hear someone say they do not have the time to read, I know I am listening to someone who is dangerous. This person may drive a car. This person is spending money on things with poor judgment. This person may be a voter. Worst of all, they may be raising children to be as ignorant as themselves.

And now, because our schools have taken on the mission of parenting and child care instead of education, new generations have come along who do not read. They don’t believe it’s necessary. They get everything they want from television, cds, dvds. They drive cars. They buy stuff. They might even vote. But you cannot know what they might do under duress, because they cannot discuss their thoughts with you. They can’t explain themselves, but they might feel like expressing their wants and concerns one day. Be aware!

Cyril P. Foley took much for granted in his small work. He assumed there were things he had witnessed in his life that might be of interest to someone else, just as he assumed it was important that he spend twenty months in the trenches to protect his right to play cricket. He did not think of himself as an important man, but he deeply understood the values which made his world possible. He believed there were matters of consequence at the heart of his life which, when revealed to others, might pass on his own understanding, and his sense of value. He did not reckon that one day his words would be lost because people no longer read.

One anecdote he tells is more than comic relief: “Going along Oxford Street in a bus,” Cyril P. Foley once recalled, “I heard the conductor telling a woman the names of the shops that had formerly stood on the site of a large store. Realising that he must have been either the freeholder, the builder or a postman, and judging him unlikely to have been either the first or the second of these I said to him, ‘How long have you been a postman?’ ‘How did you know I was a postman?’ he inquired. ‘Quite simple, my dear Watson,’ said I. The man, who had evidently not read his Sherlock Holmes, nearly fell off the bus, for his name was Watson.”

This is a perceptive mind that listens, questions, and considers.

For many years I knew that the days of my own shop were numbered. When I interviewed new employees I would warn them that the end was near like a sort of literary adventist. Stores like ours had no place in the future. Wasn’t the writing on the walls? The young ones always found my warnings humorous. The older ones usually nodded with some degree of understanding. But I always assumed there was time left. I deluded myself, despite the obvious evidence, into believing that the end was not yet at hand.

Foley’s short account of his 1909 search for the Ark of the Covenant is worth every penny for the book. One moment especially–having jury-rigged a series of short ladders as they explored the key shaft beneath Jerusalem in their quest, candles in hand: “Over my head was a huge dome or vaulted roof, and running up to the right a steep passage, half filled, as far as I could see, with great boulders. Nothing would have induced me to leave that ladder, for the slope appeared to be as slippery as ice. By the dim light of the candle it looked a grim and ghastly spot, and I could not help remembering that I was probably the fourth human being who had looked on it for 1,800 years…I was just about to descend when I heard a movement away up the passage and, in my horror, something came rushing down it with the speed of thought. Before I could move, a dreadful shape hit me full on the shoulder, knocking the candle out of my hand and leaving me in opaque darkness. Being deprived of all volition by sheer terror, I mechanically beat all records down the ladder, struck the ledge at the bottom, and turning a complete somersault, fell, with what the shilling shockers of years gone by would have described as ‘a sickening splash’ into two feet of dirty water.”

Indiana Jones, eat your heart out!

Cyril Foley was made of the sterner stuff.

After duty in the trenches at Faucaucourt, Foley was rushed, on his 47th birthday, to battle the Bulgarians at Salonica. But though he spent his time in battle, he spends his pages telling us about the court martial of a soldier for drunkenness on duty, who is acquitted because he comes to the court drunk again after a lubricated lunch with his attorney and his defense plays on his appearance as only his natural demeanor, and claiming the accusation to be a mistake.

My own foils and foibles have been a bit less dramatic. Around my 47th birthday I was battling with leaking roofs, petty theft and the Internal Revenue Service.

Just as there were thousands of mistakes I made which contributed to the weight of our final difficulties, there are countless reasons for the lack of readers. Much could be made of the sad fact that many of those who do read are reading the same books. Arguments can be waged about the merit of the writing that is being published. Pleas can be heard for better quality in the making of books. Criticism would be directed at the libraries who have forgotten their mission as they replace books with audio-visual materials. One small essay is insufficient space for the task.

This then is just a note in passing. I regret my failure most because I will no longer be able to offer the work of authors like Cyril P. Foley to the hands and minds of the few who still wish to read. I would battle a hundred leaking roofs for that honor. I will miss the bookseller’s singular daily pleasure of introducing a customer to someone they should know.

On January 12, 2009, the Wikipedia website presented a front page with an account of King Arthur. Having a life-long interest in the subject–one of my several unfinished novels is based on the legends—I read it with some interest. The article was noteworthy, but mostly for what it lacked.

Following the article was an extensive field of footnotes and links. This was impressive in size, but not in content. Most of the links were to sources which were in fact drawn from other linked sources. In other words, if I wrote an article based on the sources cited, I too could become a source. This ingrown toenail of research is equivalent to using the same word to define itself.

And though I am not a scholar, only an interested party, I immediately noticed the absence of citations for original scholarly works which might contradict the thrust of the article. The Arthur legend was, by this account, a myth built on a lie–essentially that Arthur was merely a romantic legend.

One defender of the veracity of the legends, Geoffrey Ashe, is indeed there. Ashe is footnoted several times, mostly for his attempts to defend Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a work produced more than half a millennium after the fact. But Norma L. Goodrich, who has done much greater and more interesting work in the area of original sources, is missing. I do take Goodrich’s part in the argument, but my concern is more than that.

I use Wikipedia every day. I find it to be an invaluable research tool for everything from confirmation of spelling to finding other sources I had not yet seen. But this dependence is a great handicap as well. Good scholarly research begins at home. Scholarly research is born in taking pleasure in knowing, in discovery—in grasping a mere fact and combining it with others through comprehension and imagination. Reading. If the young potential scholar is clicking their way to competence in a term paper, what does the future hold?

I have taken a great concern myself in the inherent nature of the internet as a medium which can be abused by the powers-that-be to achieve political purpose. I obviously have no problem with opinion or the free expression thereof. What I fear for is the acceptance of unvetted sources and the use of the medium to direct popular opinion.

And worse–as books become artifacts, and scholarly work is kept in the ether alone, what will be the deterrent to altering facts to suit the political disposition of the moment.

For another example, I have recently been reading the work of Amity Shlaes, the author of a wonderful book, The Forgotten Man, a new history of the Great Depression. I took a peek at the Wikipedia entry on her. It was at best an adolescent slap and at worst a Paul Krugman type abuse of fact to achieve a political put-down. I use the example of Krugman in this instance as a well known and established figure, Nobel Prize winner, and all around shite, who has spent the last twelve years of his life wallowing in his own political bile for reasons I don’t care to know. The emphasis in the Wikipedia article was clearly on certain associations and comments made by Shlaes, taken out of context, which the Wikipedia author disapproved of. And who was this critic–perhaps Krugman himself? We cannot know.

The anonymity of the source of Wikipedia articles is the problem. Anyone can be mistaken. Prejudice is natural. H. L. Mencken made a good case for that. But the hidden agenda of ‘Anonymous’ is a clear danger and warning.

It is, of course, this very anonymity that made Wikipedia grow. ‘Everyman’ might pretend to be a scholar. Like a giant ‘Facebook’ for the intellectually timid. A home for pseudo-intellectual stalkers.

Wikipedia is a great common ground of information and one of the very best developments of the internet age, but that age is only just begun, and Wikipedia is at present a sort of Central Park. By day a playground, refuge, and leafy avenue, but by night, a place where truth might be mugged and facts stolen.

As might have been said in Arthurian times, beware, ye who venture there.

Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores:

Ever thankful to those who made the effort before us, with heartfelt apologies to those who are still in the fight and the few who support them–offered upon the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston.

1. Corporate law (and the politicians, lawyers, businessmen and accountants who created it for their own benefit)–a legal fiction with more rights than the individual citizen, which allows the likes of Barnes & Noble and Walmart to write off the losses of a store in Massachusetts against the profit of another in California, while paying taxes in Delaware–for making ‘competition’ a joke and turning the free market down the dark road toward state capitalism.

2. Publishers–marketing their product like so much soap or breakfast cereal, aiming at demographics instead of people, looking for the biggest immediate return instead of considering the future of their industry, ignoring the art of typography, the craft of binding, and needs of editing, all to make a cheapened product of glue and glitz–for being careless of a 500 year heritage with devastating result.

3. Book buyers–those who want the ‘convenience’ and ‘cost savings’ of shopping in malls, over the quaint, the dusty, or the unique; who buy books according to price instead of content, and prefer what is popular over what is good–for creating a mass market of the cheap, the loud, and the shiny.

4. Writers–who sell their souls to be published, write what is already being written or choose the new for its own sake, opt to feed the demands of editors rather than do their own best work, place style over substance, and bear no standards–for boring their readers unto television.

5. Booksellers–who supply the artificial demand created by marketing departments for the short term gain, accept second class treatment from publishers, push what is ‘hot’ instead of developing the long term interest of the reader–for failing to promote quality of content and excellence in book making.

6. Government (local, state and federal)–which taxes commercial property to the maximum, driving out the smaller and marginal businesses which are both the seed of future enterprise and the tradition of the past, while giving tax breaks to chain stores, thus killing the personality of a city–for producing the burden of tax codes only accountants can love.

7. Librarians–once the guardians, who now watch over their budgets instead–for destroying books which would last centuries to find room for disks and tapes which disintegrate in a few years and require costly maintenance or replacement by equipment soon to be obsolete.

8. Book collectors–who have metamorphosed from book worms to moths attracted only to the bright; once the sentinels of a favorite author’s work, now mere speculators on the ephemeral product of celebrity–for putting books on the same level with beanie babies.

9. Teachers–assigning books because of topical appeal, or because of their own lazy familiarity, instead of choosing what is best; thus a tale about the teenage angst of a World War Two era prep school boy is pushed at students who do not know when World War Two took place–for failing to pass the torch of civilization to the next generation.

10. Editors–who have forgotten the editorial craft–for servicing the marketing department, pursuing fast results and name recognition over quality of content and offering authors the Faustian bargain of fame and fortune, while pleading their best intentions like goats.

11. Reviewers–for promoting what is being advertised, puffing the famous to gain attention, being petty and personal, and praising the obscure with priestly authority–all the while being paid by the word.

12. The Public–those who do not read books, or can not find the time; who live by the flickering light of the television, and will be the first to fear the darkening of civilization–for not caring about consequences.

Thus, we come to the twilight of the age of books; to the closing of the mind; to the pitiful end of the quest for knowledge–and stare into the cold abyss of night.

My mother’s father watched as an early airplane crash-landed in a corn field near Canton, North Carolina about 1908, and he noted to me fifty years later how the dried stalks ripped the fabric of the wings. My Father’s father was a river boat captain on the Mississippi. As an assistant Captain working for the Steckfus Lines, he unwittingly hired an underage musician named Armstrong in New Orleans to work in the band on the return trip to St. Louis. The air age and the jazz age seem well behind us now, but I grew up with the stories of those times.

My mother’s great grandfather was a doctor to Confederate troops. That once seemed quite remote to me, mostly because she never knew him–but he had cared for my grandfather when the boy was stricken with polio, a great killer of the time, and saved him and then raised him as his own so that he may one day see that early airplane. I myself was part of the testing of the first Polio vaccine on Long Island in the Early 1950’s.

Time is relative, not only for the number of forebears you might recall, but because, the human history of things is really so short. As a boy I was fascinated with the Norman Rockwell painting of a family tree, depicting the generations from pirate of the Spanish Main to pirate of Wall Street. I especially liked the unhappy Indian in their midst, because my mother’s grandmother was said to be part Cherokee.

I was never terribly good with math, and so avoided the numbers involved. Now, it impresses me more to consider: it has only been about eighty generations-—80 times my mother’s mother or father’s father–since the blood in my veins bled from the whip of a Roman soldier on the back of a Celtic slave. To say a number like two thousand years makes time unimaginable. But, conjuring eighty of your relatives in a room is not so difficult-—I’ve actually seen that with my own eyes–and then projecting them back in time as if they were standing on each other’s shoulders is more than a great circus act. It actually makes the history that my family has survived more comprehendible.

Only forty generations ago, some of my family fought the invasion of the Normans in 1066, and others fought with them. Less than twenty generations ago a luckless relative of mine–likely indentured–died of fever in the swaps around Jamestown, Virginia. Only five generations ago a penniless Irishman first broke the earth around Lansing, Iowa and prayed for rain.

History is no longer taught in our public schools. The protests of erstwhile history teachers aside, the average high school graduate cannot answer the most fundamental questions about his own past. Social Studies has taken the place of history, and that subject being guided by political concerns more than fact, the comprehension of time has diminished to the narrow spectrum of a single life. I think the great growth of interest in nostalgia with baby boomers–arguably a sign of curiosity about the past–is more a manifestation of ignorance. What we have personal knowledge of is all that matters to a generation steeped in its own self interest.

The caricature of the British blue blood pacing the halls of his country house beneath the portraits of generations brings a another thought to me now. It was an awareness of one’s place in the scheme of things which once made everything possible. Our actions reflected upon our fathers, and our sons. Marriage was an act of blood union. Our carnal tastes had consequences beyond the moment.

The physics of history are still bound by the laws of relativity. This is more than pun and metaphor. Ignorance of the past makes for a more uncertain future. In a world of atomic power and demonic virus, there is no guarantee that we will get to repeat our mistakes as past generations have. The foolish emphasis in schools upon social gratification over fact and logic is appalling, as well as frightening.

Now, studies of mitochondrial DNA have connected all of mankind to a single woman who walked the earth only 200,000 year ago. That’s about 7000 generations. That is the memory of a little more than 2000 grandparents passed on. About the size of a small town.

Issues of cultural identity and heritage are not unimportant. The insistence on a disembodied multicultural awareness in a society quickly loosing its marrow in the rush of history cannot make us stronger. I am half Irish by decent, but American by nature. I take my freedoms to be more than a right to vote. A slave is free to serve. I am certainly a slave if all my freedoms are proscribed.

The overwhelming fact of our short history on the earth is that we have spent the blood of generations to finally achieve a sense of ourselves as individuals. The religious may argue for other definitions–still, the evidence of history surrounds us as much as it flows in our veins. From family to clan, to tribe, to nation to what?—in only a few generations. But if our species has any heritage, it is the will to be free.

Every gesture of familial care is an effort to safeguard the generation to come—the future. Every political deal wrought in smoke and sweat is an effort to preserve what exists—the present. And yet, every child sets out to reconquer the world as if it were only just discovered by themselves—regardless of history. All the pain of a 8000 generations cannot keep a single girl from falling in love.

The nature of us all–each a bit of fragile flesh–is to make the world anew. The tribal law may forbid, the king may order, the general may command, the religion may instruct, but in spite of these fences, we will always stop on our way to taste the apple of knowledge. Whatever God might have shaped us from the clay, he could not have mistaken this one fact. Whom ever judges us on our final day, we have only been what we were made to be.

What desperate or foolish parent of my blood would hire himself to the army of a Norman lord. What ignorant girl would take such a soldier for a husband.

When a thin Scots-Irish boy of my not so distant heritage left home that early morning to see what might be found beyond the mountain, did he comprehend the size of the bear he would have to kill in order to return a heroic provider instead of a fading memory to siblings with their own dreams.

My own children now set out upon the sea of history. They have a better knowledge than most in their generation of the past that is beneath and behind them, and of the power of the tides. And my own nostalgia will soon be flotsam to another generation.

So I had this idea.

I was reading an article I printed out from Drudge about how the newspapers were dying because nobody was reading them anymore. This was during a break in my own work wherein I bemoan (as in piss and bemoan) the passing of the book and the end of civilization. Earlier I had Googled up statistics on reading and found yet another tombstone statement about how the average American consumes less than a book a year. I wiped my word weary eyes and complained out loud to myself, “Self. You used to read a couple of books a week. Now you read little more than a book a month. Ain’t you part of the problem?”

I don’t take criticism quietly. People say I’m a little defensive. I take the slight and tell myself there is nothing little about it. I replied, “Sure you did. And a newspaper for breakfast as well.”

“Liar!” I protested. “You never read the whole newspaper. You skimmed. And I’ll bet you skipped the boring bits of those books too.”

“Oh, but no, no, newsprint-breath.” I retorted in my best imitation of Ed McMahon, “If a book didn’t hold its own in chapter one or two, I would quit and start another. I learned as an adolescent, that it only counts when you go all the way. When I did read a book, I read it through. But you are correct, sir, about the newspapers. They never really were good enough all the way from the front page headline to the classifieds.”

(Perhaps my problem is this: because only one in ten readers today even knows who Ed McMahon is, it bespeaks of my age even more than my reading habits to bring him into this monologue.) I read poetry everyday. I read parts of books for background reference. I read thousands of words on the screen and I print out from twenty to forty pages of material every day from the web. About 150 pages a week at least. I read pretty much all of this. I chose it, after all. It meets my exact intellectual need of the moment. And it more than replaces the newspapers and books I once read—it surpasses them. I get more excellent writing on a greater range of subject, and I get it when and where I want it.

I said, “So what’s the problem?’

Not so funny I should ask.

Mr. John Donne, a great writer who is practically if not virtually unread today, offered one line which most people know. The one about islands and men. If I read just what I want—that self-selected cream of the literary crop—I have isolated my own intellect in a very crucial way. I know more and more about less and less. I can thus become a brain surgeon specializing in very small brains. Good for mice, but not for men.

The great ‘liberal education’ of Charles Eliot (Charles who? Was he George’s older sister?) was a five foot shelf of the literature which had made Western Civilization what it was. For those who do not respect Western Civilization because of what John Wayne did to it afterward, I would suggest you are a nincompoop (a wonderful word, indeed). But what Eliot understood was that Western Civilization was not a finished work but an ongoing process–less than two and a half thousand years set against a couple of hundred thousand. He knew that our ignorance exceeds our grasp, but we had better reach for that non sequitur quick, because the lion does not sleep tonight. All of that. Only he would not have said it quite that way.

And while Irish immigrants and Minnesota farm boys were dying to end slavery in America (Yes. That was what it was about. Idiot! Don’t start that states rights argument again.) more than three quarters of the world’s population still lived in slavery from Brazil to Russia. Does anybody processed by the American public education system know that? Or would they even care?

Half the population of the world still lives in virtual slavery to this day–that is ‘virtual’ as in, “Eat your rice and shut up. Don’t make a lot of noise or we’ll rape you again. You were supposed to sew two pockets on four hundred dresses today, not four pockets on two hundred dresses. You can eat when you have finished hauling that salt out of that hole of mine.” That kind of virtual. Not the glassy cool of a plasma screen ‘virtual.’

I do not wish for a government edict. Nantes to that. What I suggest is that it’s up to you. No, I mean you. Right. You either give a goddamn or you don’t. If you don’t, why the hell are you reading this? There must be a cgi effect you missed in that last film adaptation of the greatest works of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. If you give a goddamn, you have to read. It doesn’t matter the medium unless you need a massage in which case I suggest you avoid the newspaper classifieds. You need to read broadly and Greatly. You need to read to save your life.

The newspaper can save itself. The New York Times could downsize to the equivalent of the New York Sun back when Francis Pharcellus Church told Virginia O’Hanlon that “love and generosity and devotion” still existed. (And I’m talking about the number of pages, not the size of the pages, you dope.) A smaller newspaper would cost less, and use its editorial expertise to cull the known world for what was really ‘news’ and not just sensation. Britney and Paris would not make the cut. People who think they have the time for sluts do not buy newspapers. The Vietnamese grocer in the Bronx who is standing up to the gang bangers would be there. Small business owners read newspapers, gang bangers do not. The Senator making excuses for why he is not responsible for the votes he made in Congress would get no space for his poppycock, but a factual analysis of the damage of that Senator’s votes to property values in Staten Island would. Property owners read newspapers, and the Senator will only read a newspaper that has him by the throat. And for broader analysis, the paper would index on-line sources and its own website.

Etcetera. A regular newspaper reader of average interest and intelligence could tell Pinch, the old gray lady’s current keeper, more about how to save his rag than a hundred self-important editorial minions. But Pinch won’t ask. He’ll sell short. The New York Times is already yesterday’s news because it has no clue how to compete with the internet and it has no reason to exist beyond the next stock holders meeting. Pinch does not believe in the power of ‘love and generosity and devotion,’ and were he to judge, would have thrown Edmund Gwenn out of the court.

I’m that old. Maureen O’Hara is still my idea of a woman. I must believe in miracles because I believe books will survive. Little screens just can’t cut the aesthetic mustard (or mix a good metaphor). But even when they can, (and I understand they will some day) books will still survive because they are the unfungible, untampered and untempered record of a still vital and growing culture.

So I have this idea. What if they threw an ‘end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it’ party and nobody came? What would my hero be doing at the time?