Saving the Book

I feel a tinge of sympathy for Noah, son of David L. Ulin, author of this elegant and blessedly short book with the dead-end title. Noah is resisting his ninth-grade assignment to annotate the book before him, The Great Gatsby; he finds the task tedious and boring. All he wants to do is to read it, enjoy it. "This is why reading is over," he says to his father. "None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore." An ordinary family tiff? A clash of the generations? Or maybe something seismic.

I understand the boy's pain and recall my own brief joy some years ago when a book by G. K. Chesterton, ordered online, reached my door and I immediately dove into it. Chesterton has been a companion over the years, especially on long flights during my time as a working journalist, going from country to country. I enjoyed Father Brown's genius as it unfolded, defeating chaos and thwarting criminals with the sword of human logic. Unfortunately my new book was thoroughly annotated, which I hadn't expected; I stumbled through my first venture into it, constantly interrupted by annoying references at the bottom of each page. So I shelved the book and returned to the pristine pages of the Father Brown omnibus.

Ulin's book sparkles with literary erudition and alarming technical information. He was raised in Manhattan's affluent upper East Side, encircled by his parents' walls of books of all shapes, colors, and contents, a decorative style he followed as he grew up, married, and constructed his own private library.

Just how profound is his affection for books? He confesses to experiencing an unusual reaction when he enters bookshops, at home and abroad: "All of a sudden my stomach would roll and my sphincter would tighten, and I would feel an urgency that was physical and metaphysical, an expression of my body and my mind. I loved that feeling, loved how it made me quicken, loved the sense that I was sinking." He regards these places with reverence; he likes the smell of them, the darkness of them, all the thousands of mysteries they contain. They are "holy sites," he says—Valhallas for the works of famous writers, dead and alive.

Ulin's book offers us a visit with a broad array of good writers. But, of greater importance, it is a warning of the storm of technology that is upon us, an analysis of its dark expectations for the book and its future, and even for the way we live our lives.

Concerns for books are in the air—again. In the 1980s they raised more than a small amount of tension here and there, and fifty decades before that perhaps even more, when up to a billion tomes were doomed to quietly go up in smoke. Dark questions and predictions are rife: can the book survive as the principal instrument in which our art and culture is carried forth into the future? Maybe not. People are turning away from reading, newspapers mainly, but books too. The downward slide was certainly foreseen in the thirties, when F. Scott Fitzgerald published "The Crack-Up" (1936). He wrote that things were bad and getting worse for books, the people who read them, and people who write them: "As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best-selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures," he wrote, and that eventually we would see "the power of the written word subordinated to another power, a more glittery, a grosser power." It would take more than just movies to cause that. By the 1950s television's challenge to books became glaringly evident. And Thomas Edison, an even earlier doubter whose opinion on such things mattered, emerged full of certainty in 1913: "Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to touch every branch of...