In a couple of decades, we will celebrate a momentous event: the invention of the printing press.
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Johann Gutenberg’s first major book was the 1455 Latin Bible, but he had printed shorter works as early as 1450. What we now call “printing” has changed significantly over the intervening six centuries, but the end product — words printed on paper — has not. Gutenberg might have been astounded by the ease with which we print books — and with the existence of a printing press (called a “printer”) in almost every home — but he would have recognized the end product immediately. Books have been printed using some form of printing press for nearly six centuries.
Not so long ago, it was a sign of status to own and display books in one’s office or home. Actually, it was not just a sign; there was a causative relationship between owning books and raising children into the upper and middle classes. The presence of books, especially at home, increased the tendency for children to begin reading on their own and to be successful in school and at work. Books at home made children more comfortable with reading and more likely to choose a career in which reading played an important role. One could be an excellent roofer without much literacy, but doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors were all expected to be highly literate.
Dolly Parton recognized this when she established a charity to distribute a small “library” of books (“Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library”) to poor households in Appalachia, where she was born. Distributing books is one of the best things Parton could have done to benefit children like herself who never had a chance to read their own books at home. I’m sure her charity made a difference in the lives of many, encouraging them to move from poverty into the middle class.
As recently as the 1960s, door-to-door salesmen came to one’s home selling sets of encyclopedias, and those who could not afford a new set often bought one used. It was, in effect, the Wikipedia of its day, where one could magically access an article on almost any topic in just a few minutes. And like other kinds of reading (assignments to read Shakespeare, Austen, Hawthorne, or various histories and other textbooks), it encouraged more reading and made one more fluent at doing so. Those assigned to read one play by Shakespeare would often go on to read others, just out of curiosity. Pride and Prejudice was an open door to an imaginative world of great wisdom and humanity.
Now all this has changed. Gutenberg would have recognized today’s printed book or magazine, but he would have been clueless about the computers, phones, pads, and other screens that have largely displaced printing on paper. And I suspect he would have recognized a qualitative difference between the two.
Most families today do not display libraries of books, nor do they make much use of public libraries. (Only 48 percent of Americans made any use of a public library within the past year.) Their constant companions today are the smartphone and the computer, with 91 percent of adults owning a smartphone and the average American checking his phone 205 times daily. Children now grow up with a different mentality from what they had just fifty or sixty years ago. I knew a young man who spent his Christmas break reading War and Peace and bragged about it afterwards, to the admiration of his teachers if not all of his friends at school. Another friend, still in her mid-teens and influenced by her libertarian father, read the complete works of Ayn Rand and became a lifelong conservative herself. I doubt if that amount and intensity of reading is commonplace today. One report reveals that only a small minority of teens have read even one full-length novel like Moby-Dick.
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In its place are generations of non-book-readers who are more comfortable with words appearing on computers and phones. Researchers have debated whether there is much difference between reading from paper and reading from screens. I believe that there is, though nothing will turn back the clock.
The days when printed books were a central part of education and later life are gone forever. The Age of Gutenberg is over. Those of us who still read or re-read books like Moby-Dick and Crime and Punishment were raised before the advent of screens and probably just find it difficult to adapt, even though these and millions of other books are available in digital form online. We feel we’re not actually “reading” unless we have a physical book in our hands, and we find it difficult to focus on screens.
It appears that the human brain and human society are changing, just as it began to change six centuries ago with the widespread availability of printed books. There is evidence that reading, by which we mean extended periods of concentration focused on a book, actually “transforms the brain by enhancing cognitive functions, strengthening neural connections, and promoting neuroplasticity, leading to improved memory, empathy, and overall mental health.” Certainly, it increases the ability to engage in critical thinking and to make more precise verbal distinctions.
Is it an accident that among those generations that no longer have the patience to read a 700-page novel like Anna Karenina, with all of its sensitivity and instances of empathy, that “ultimate fighting” has proven popular? One headline from the UFC website reads, “Machine Gun Kelly Doubles Down on Conor McGregor Hate after His Injury at UFC229 — F— This Dude.” Not exactly Shakespeare or Wordsworth, and it is a reflection of a cruder and less empathetic way of thinking on the part of the fighters and their audience.
Serious readers have always been in the minority, but even more so in the post-Gutenberg era. By the time we celebrate the 600-year anniversary of the printing press, there will probably be even fewer books being printed and libraries will be increasingly centers of digital devices and coffee shops. But we should not lose sight of the value of printed books — of what they have contributed and still have to contribute to human society.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
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Image via Pexels.