19/04/2015 Too Many Books? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/16/too-many-books/?printpage=true 1/6

Erich Lessing/Art Resource

Too Many Books?Tim Parks

Giuseppe Arcimboldo: The Librarian, 1566.

19/04/2015 Too Many Books? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/16/too-many-books/?printpage=true 2/6

Is there a relationship between the quantity of books available to us, the ease with

which they can be written and published, and our reading experience?

At present, for example, it’s hard not to feel that we are in an era of massive

overproduction. Just when we were already overwhelmed with paper books, often

setting them aside after only a few pages in anxious search of something more

satisfying, along came the Internet and the e-book so that, wonderfully, we now

have access to hundreds of thousands of contemporary novels and poems from

this very space into which I am writing.

Inevitably, this tends to diminish the seriousness with which I approach any

particular book. Certainly the notion that these works could ever be arranged in

any satisfactory order, or that any credible canon will ever emerge, is gone

forever. I’m disoriented and don’t expect things to be otherwise any time soon.

So would it be provocatively reductive to say that in the end our experience of

literature might be crucially influenced by the mere supply and availability of the

materials necessary for its production? If there hadn’t been all that paper, if

printing costs had been higher, if the computer and Internet hadn’t opened up

endless oceans of space on which to write, would we take our books more

seriously? Would we find our way around more easily?

The idea is hardly new. In the Dunciad, 1742, responding to what he already saw

as a deafening chorus of incompetent poets, Alexander Pope spoke of “snows of

paper” providing space for the ever more widespread publication of the

“uncreating word.” A century later, with paper mills and printing presses ever

more mechanized and publishers rapidly expanding the number of titles, Thomas

Carlyle has this passage in his satire Sartor Resartus (1835)—remember that at

this point paper was still being made from recycled rags:

If such supply of printed Paper should rise so far as to choke up the

highways and public thoroughfares, new means must of necessity be had

recourse to.… In the mean while, is it not beautiful to see five million quintals

of Rags picked annually from the Laystall; and annually, after being

macerated, hot-pressed, printed on, and sold,—returned thither; filling so

many hungry mouths by the way?

To sort out the serious from the superficial in the mounting snowdrifts of paper,

critics were needed. Johnson had been an early example. But critics rarely agree,

and they themselves are under pressure from the market, from employers, from

literary friends, and perhaps from the publishers with whom they themselves

publish novels. In his excellent book White Magic, an account of the history of

paper, Lothar Müller has a lengthy section on Balzac’s trilogy Illusions perdues,

where the crucial illusion lost is that a writing career could genuinely remain

19/04/2015 Too Many Books? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/16/too-many-books/?printpage=true 3/6

serious in a philistine world. And one of the reasons for this was the conditions

under which critics worked, the high fees paid for apparently authoritative

criticism that would make or break books and hence have a direct influence on

sales. The critic feels impelled to create a new celebrity or destroy an old one,

something all too evident today in the writing of even the most respected critics

we have. The resulting rhetoric often borders on the grotesque: Knausgaard’s My

Struggle, a Guardian reviewer writes, “has strong claim to be the great literary

event of the 21st century.” As a reluctant afterthought, he adds “—so far.”

Needless to say, it wasn’t always like this. Anyone who has studied English

literature in college will remember observing that in courses on early medieval

literature or Old English there are really very few texts to choose from. In the pre-

modern era social conditions were vastly different but, crucially, paper itself was

scarce and text reproduction was difficult. With little writing around there was little

reason for most people to be literate. For those who could read and write each

text was more likely to be precious and important. It was easy to get your

bearings.

True, in the early 1300s, with the establishment of the first partially mechanized

paper mills in Italy, a more generous supply of paper began to circulate and the

number of people able to write rapidly increased. All the same, the only way to

have more than one copy of what you’d written was to write it out again on

another piece of paper, or pay someone else to do that for you. These limitations

naturally encouraged people to keep things short and to invest the act of writing

with a certain solemnity.

For centuries, if what you had written was going to be shown to others, it would

have to be placed in a library, usually a church library. And since the only way

anyone would know that a new piece of literature had been written was if the writerpersonally put the word around, there would usually be some kind of social

connection between writer and readers. At best, then, you could appeal to a

literate elite, sharing the same written language—Latin—that was inaccessible to

the masses. Perhaps the offspring of these elite would also read you. In fact it was

easier to imagine a reputation in centuries to come than widespread diffusion in

one’s own time. The perception was that the essential quality of writing was its

separation of mental material from mortal grey matter. Word and idea weredisembodied and stabilized in order to travel through time, not to be infinitely

multiplied in the present.

In general, then, the conditions for supporting the independent professional writer

who makes a living from his work just weren’t there. At most, one could hope to

come under the patronage of a king, or a city-state, or the church. You could be

commissioned to write a treatise or a history. These were not circumstances where

19/04/2015 Too Many Books? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/16/too-many-books/?printpage=true 4/6

it would be easy to write things your patrons didn’t agree with. Or you might

attach yourself to a theater company, where actors would repeat things you had

written, though not necessarily word for word. Now your writing might travel alittle if the theater company traveled. But most likely it wouldn’t. Traveling

companies would not be performing elaborately scripted plays until the sixteenth

century.

With the arrival of print in the late fifteenth century, it was suddenly possible to

start thinking of a mass audience; 20 million books had been printed in Europe by

1500. Yet it was the printing shops—often more than one if a book was popular—

rather than the authors, who made the money. You might write out of a passion toget your ideas around, or out of megalomania—never a condition to be

underestimated where writers are concerned—but there was still no steady money

to be had producing writing of whatever kind. In economic terms, it was hardly

worth insisting you were the author of a text, hence the anonymous book was

rather more common than it is today.

Meantime, with this new possibility of printing so many books it made sense to

start thinking of all those people who didn’t know Latin. The switch to writing inthe vernacular had begun; this meant that, though more copies were being sold,

most books were now trapped inside their language community. There were

scholars capable of translating of course, and a book that made a big impression

in one country would eventually be translated into another. But it took time, and it

wouldn’t happen if a book didn’t impress in its original language. Nor for the

most part were these translators under contract with publishers. Initially, they were

simply scholars who translated what they were interested in and what they believedwas worth disseminating. Think of that.

In 1710, Britain’s Queen Anne introduced the first of a series of laws recognizing

an author’s right to control the copying of his work. Suddenly, it made economic

sense to address yourself to everybody who could afford to pay for a book,

rather than to your peer group; much better to write one book that sold in huge

quantities than many books that were of interest only to a chosen few. And if the

work could be sold in another country it was now worth paying a translator totranslate, even if he or she, but usually at this point he, was not especially

interested in the work, or perhaps actively disliked it. Writing, translating, and

publishing were all becoming jobs.

It was really at this point—when one could imagine pursuing literature as a source

of income, and, thanks to copyright, dream of making a lifetime’s fortune from a

single book (I have frequently dreamed this dream)—that we became preoccupied

with the decline of serious writing. In 1750 Samuel Johnson was already remarkingof the novels of the previous generation that the typical author “had no further

19/04/2015 Too Many Books? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/16/too-many-books/?printpage=true 5/6

April 16, 2015, 2:35 p.m.

care than to retire to his closet, let loose his invention, and heat his mind withincredibilities; a book was thus produced without fear of criticism, without the toil

of study, without knowledge of nature, or acquaintance with life.”

Two and a half centuries later, the abundance and daunting multiplication of

possible reading material, combined with a feeling that some of it at least ought to

be tremendously serious and even spiritually enlightening, has created an

exasperated, delusive determination to establish prominent landmarks. The literary

prize, needless to say, is part of the phenomenon, each sponsor eager to be ableto claim to having crowned the new king or queen of the now global empire of

literature and spared the reader the disorientation of the teeming market place. But

anyone who has sat on the jury for a literary prize knows how arbitrary the final

verdict often is, dependent on the meshing and conflict of the people who happen

to be on the jury. And even if prizes were a reliable way of establishing that one

book is better than others, there are now so many literary prizes that it is simply

impossible to read all the winners, never mind those shortlisted.

How to respond, then, to this now permanent condition of overproduction? Withcheerful skepticism. With gratitude for those rare occasions when we come across

a book that speaks to us personally. With forgiveness for those critics and

publishers who induce us to waste our time with some literary flavor of the day.

Absolutely without indignation, since none of this is anyone’s particular “fault.”

Above all with a sense of wonder and curiosity at the general and implacable

human determination (mine included) to fill endless space with dubious mentalmaterial when life is short and there are so many other things to be done.

RELATED

A Book in the DarknessCharles Simic

19/04/2015 Too Many Books? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/16/too-many-books/?printpage=true 6/6

Stifled by SuccessTim Parks

The Knausgaard FallacyTim Parks

© 1963-2015 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.