Richard Eoin Nash

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The book business as Benjamin’s Angel of History (my take on Ted Striphas’s THE LATE AGE OF PRINT)

So I’m now in the review business (and damn, it’s a lotta work…). Daniel Pritchard has a lovely new literary review site, The Critical Flame and he asked me to review an awfully important book, Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print. I’d originally heard of the book via Scott Esposito’s superb interview in Quarterly Conversation this past Spring and urge you to check it out pronto.

In the meantime, a couple of my favorite bits below, and the link itself, natch.

We tend to view history in terms of one age succeeding another, the greater vanquishing the lesser, or the tawdry always winning out over the elevated. The reality, Striphas demonstrates, is that we’re a populist capitalist democracy, a world where people are trying to get ahead, and the information contained in books, and the social status books have occasionally offered, are tools for getting ahead. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism; they virtually began it, they are part of the fuel that drives it, and they are key for understanding ways in which consumer capitalism is changing and evolving, in some respects into a whole other beast. That is book culture. Books are not apart from commerce. And because that is book culture, it is far less in peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of the imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and separate from the everyday (a word Striphas is fond of, more of which anon) than it actually is…

[B]e it in the 1920’s or the 2000’s, not so much changes. Faced with a scenario in which they can’t cost-effectively match supply and demand, publishers seek to use the new arts and sciences of marketing to persuade people to buy more. In 1930, a consortium of trade publishers hired Edward L. Bernays, the “father of spin,” to concoct a juice-up of the book business. Quoting Bernays’ biographer:

“Where there are bookshelves,” [Bernays] reasoned, “there will be books.” So he got respectable public figures to endorse the importance of books to civilization, and then he persuaded architects, contractors, and decorators to put up shelves on which to store the precious volumes.

While the bookshelf trick is truly ingenious, it only reinforced what was already happening, in that the burgeoning American middle class needed to communicate “respectability and plenitude,” even during or perhaps especially during, the Great Depression — libraries were an excellent way to accomplish that. Bernays was merely surfing an existing wave. Obviously the use of celebrities to coax America into reading is a hobby-horse of the present time too, but it is not the only echo. Bernays’ stunt in particular and the obsession with advertising in general (which Striphas catalogs for much of the twentieth century) reminds me of the current infatuation with social media. Then as now, publishers seize on the most superficial aspect of a social phenomenon — then it was the need for the growing middle class to ratify its status through books; now, it is the transformation of consumer-producer relations from monologue to dialogue. Yet, all that publishing provides is bookcases and all we offer now is Facebook fan pages for authors and publishers, as well as Twitter feeds that mostly (though, to be fair, not exclusively) still seek to push product.

Richard Eoin Nash, Sep 09, 2009

• futureisnow
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• reading
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• publishing
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• history of books
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• ted striphas
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• bookselling
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• late age of print

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For all practical intents and purposes, the community has always been God. The seven deadly sins are deadly because they destroy community.

So I would argue that the local bookstore is indeed sacred, not because it sells books, but because it is part of the community. It is sacred in exactly the same way that the local hardware store is. In the medium-term the community suffers when Walmart moves in, for example; I would suggest that the community suffered in much the same way (via loss of local bookstores) when Amazon “moved in”. (Amazon was not the only factor; but Amazon’s prices + rising rents + whatever the City does about restricting parking, und so weiter.)

Amazon’s success is an effect of the shrinking of the middle class; its employment policies also contribute to the shrinking of the middle class. (This does not mean I am a fan of the middle class; I find the middle-class sense of entitlement to be quite CEO-sized. But a consumer economy depends entirely on middle-class incomes to continue.)

With books moving to dialogue-enabling e-formats, physical, retail bookstores selling new books might well disappear. In that case community will become virtual as well as physical. Though there will always be print books because rare and beautiful objects will always have value, Arthur Rackham is not going to be illustrating Chilton repair manuals anytime soon, or diet books, or bathroom remodeling books, or most of the book trade’s stock.

This scenario still ignores the question of electricity, or, more broadly speaking, power supply. While I expended my spirit in a waste of waste yesterday there were 2 power outages at home. All book-producing activity ceased until the juice came back. January last year a cyclone knocked out the day-job’s website for 2 hours. The day-job is on the left coast where cyclones are confined to reruns of The Wizard of Oz.

You can see where I’m going with this. The e-book is on its way. There is no telling how long it will be the dominant form. Gods change.

    – MF (09/10 04:28 PM)

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