A brief reply to Ed West about reading

And a suggestion for Daunt Books Publishing

In his critique of Marriott’s book, Henry Oliver made the point that ‘it is my suspicion that what a lot of people who agree with The New Dark Ages’ description of modern culture really regret is not the death of print but the winnowing of upper-middlebrow culture: BBC documentaries, intellectuals on talk shows, Kenneth Clark, Melvyn Bragg, that sort of thing.’

In my case that is absolutely true, but one might also argue that the two things are linked: that the high-minded documentary making of the 1970s was written, produced and commissioned by people who had grown up in a print culture, and this is not true of the generations that followed. As print declined, so television came to serve a population that had adopted a more oral culture, lacking the ability to follow content with the same depth. The decline of reading, and the decline of high-minded, quality television - what Oliver calls the ‘passive high-brow’ - are part of the same trend.

That is from Ed West today. I quite agree about the print-television link and the subsequent decline of television, but if you want it back you have to care first and foremost about books. One way of putting this point is that if the people who think the decline of reading is a civilizational crisis are serious, they ought to get a lot more old fogeyish about reading. Turn off Kenneth Clark and pick up C.S. Lewis! Stop talking about the decline of reading (and television) and start reading a hundred pages every evening and blogging about it! It really is time to start memorizing Shakespeare in public. (Much to his credit, this is exactly what James Marriott is currently doing.) Follow Matthew Yglesias’ lead and read all of George Eliot’s novels. Or do what Helen Lewis does and publish a monthly reading diary. (None of this is meant to be “against Ed”—for all I know, he is a reliable reader.)

What people like Ed really ought to care about, it seems to me, is whether children are made to memorize poems, how well the elites know their Shakespeare, that sort of thing. Worrying about democracy, culture, and attention spans seems quite speculative and too far down the chain. I recently spoke to a young waitress in a small town in Pennsylvania who listens to one book a month, spends a lot of time on TikTok, doesn’t know who Jane Austen was (seriously), and who gave the impression of being utterly smart and sensible. She is relatively apolitical but is taking an interest in the midterms so she can vote for the first time. Democracy is quite as safe with her as it was with my grandmother. I don’t think she lacks the ability to follow content at all. Naturally, I would love her to read Jane Austen, but we shouldn’t be too pessimistic about what will happen if she doesn’t. My grandparents never did, and it didn’t stop them contributing to the war effort and living as the sort of solid citizens Ed and James are worried we are now losing. Not everyone is a reader.

Relatedly, in the New Yorker, there is a splendid profile of James Daunt and his genius for making bookshops profitable. I spend far too much money in Barnes & Noble, thanks to his talents. What I want him to do next is to have his publisher, Daunt Books Publishing, put out two things. First, a range of cheap classics. When I was young, you could buy most of the classic works of English Literature for one or two pounds in the Penguin Popular Classics range. It was low-grade stuff, very little in the way of notes, and utterly marvelous. I still have many of my old copies. Then I want them to do a new version of the Everyman’s Library. Not those Penguin cloth-bound editions that are so bulky, but pocket books, Clarissa in four volumes, that sort of thing. Something you can put in your bag or jacket pocket without getting a sore shoulder. Maybe Daunt Books could also be the ones to produce the Library of Britain…