The World of Reading
Why reading must survive, why it must be encouraged, and why everyone who lives by books has a duty to help create readers.
A civilisation can lose the habit of reading without ever announcing that it has done so. No decree is required. No library need be burnt. People simply stop opening books.
At first, very little seems to have changed. Books are still printed. Writers still write them. Publishers still issue catalogues. Prizes are awarded. Photographs are taken beside newly launched titles. Yet if fewer people are willing to sit alone with a page and give it their full attention, the whole structure has begun to hollow out.
A book is not alive because it has been printed. It becomes alive when somebody reads it.
There can be no world of books without a world of readers.
Reading asks for something the modern world is constantly trying to take away: attention.
To read is to remain with one thought long enough for it to alter another. It is to enter a room in which nobody is shouting for your attention. There is no notification at the bottom of the page. No machine decides what sentence you ought to see next.
You may stop. You may return. You may disagree. You may sit with a difficult idea for an hour and discover that it has become your own.
This is one of the quiet pleasures of reading. It restores possession of the mind to the person using it.
A child who learns to enjoy books discovers something more important than vocabulary. The child discovers that boredom need not be feared, that solitude need not be empty, and that another human life can be entered without travelling anywhere.
Because a society that stops reading does not merely lose books. It loses a way of thinking.
Reading trains the mind to follow an argument beyond a headline. It teaches us to distinguish what a person said from what somebody says he said. It gives memory length. It makes comparison possible.
A person who reads widely becomes harder to hurry. That person has heard too many voices to believe that the loudest voice must be right.
This is why reading matters beyond literature. The habit belongs to citizenship, education, work, family and private judgement. A population that cannot bear a page of sustained thought becomes easy prey for slogans.
No readers, no books.
No books, no publishing culture.
No publishing culture, no durable world for writers.
Readers do not appear by accident.
A child surrounded only by instructions to study may learn to pass examinations without ever discovering the pleasure of reading. A young person who meets books only as prescribed texts may reasonably conclude that reading is another form of duty.
That is a failure of the adults around him.
We must show that a book can be opened for no examination, no certificate and no advantage except the pleasure of finding out what another human being has thought.
We should put books into homes. We should speak of them at dinner tables. We should take children into bookshops and libraries before they begin to think such places belong only to scholars. We should recommend books without asking whether the recommendation will profit us.
Reading survives when somebody passes the habit to somebody else.
A publisher cannot reasonably complain about the disappearance of readers while doing nothing to create them.
Publishing is not merely the conversion of manuscripts into saleable objects. If that were all it was, a publisher would be little more than a manufacturer with better paper.
The publisher stands between the writer and the reader. That position carries a responsibility. We must publish books worth reading, certainly. But we must also defend the habit that makes reading possible.
The same is true of writers. It is not enough to ask the world to read our own books. We must be prepared to recommend the books of others, to speak about what we ourselves have read, and to enlarge the company of readers rather than merely compete for its attention.
Anyone whose work depends upon books has an interest in the survival of reading. We would go further. We have a duty towards it.
A small manifesto for a world of readers
Reading grows when recommendation is an act of generosity rather than advertising.
One good book at the right time can restore an abandoned habit.
It is difficult to persuade the young that books matter if they never see us open one.
A book discussed becomes part of ordinary life instead of an object left upon a shelf.
Libraries, bookshops, classrooms and quiet corners are not decorative. They are part of the reading culture.
If every conversation about books becomes a sale, people will eventually stop listening.
The work is larger than selling the next book.
We must help build the society in which books can continue to matter.
That means publishing well. It also means encouraging reading wherever we can, among children, young people, families, professionals and those who once loved books but have allowed the habit to disappear.
Creating readers is not separate from publishing. It is part of publishing.