Packaging Print
Are books necessarily better than other homes for serious writing?
I rarely read complete books.
Rather, for as long as I can remember, most of the texts I have embraced have taken the form of articles in magazines, chapters in anthologies, or stories in collections. Indeed, despite spending many decades in the company of mountainous heaps of text, the number of books I have read, from tip to tail, from stem to stern, from ‘Call me Ishmael’ to ‘Finis’, could fit inside a piece of carryon luggage.
Lately, moreover, the habit of spending a working day each week in my car and another working with illustrations has let me to replace much of my retail reading with literary listening. Thus, in 2024, I read but one of the short pieces penned by Nathanial Hawthorne, but drove to the sound of someone reading three works of that ilk. (Thank you, Librivox!)
Of late, a volley of jeremiads, hurled by small-screen pundits I admire, has led me to wonder if this approach to reading has left a lacuna in my education. After all, when Jared Henderson describes the failure of folks to read whole books as a ‘literacy crisis’, I feel that I have somehow failed to do my part for the West I love so well. Likewise, each time the Lady of the Library reminds me that ‘books save lives’, I suspect that the smorgasbord of fragments I consume would not qualify for membership in her rescue squad. (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?)
The length of a proper book - which usually employs a hundred thousand words or more - allows for the systematic development of a complex idea. Indeed, a well-crafted book will show the evolution of several weight-bearing ideas, each of which displays, with each successive appearance, a greater degree of sophistication, complexity, and nuance.
However well-crafted it might be, an article cannot do this. Rather, the best that the author of a shorter work can do is introduce an idea or, in cases when he can safely presume that readers enjoy familiarity with a concept, offer some form of refinement. (He may also begin the process of refutation. Finishing that job, however, will probably require a fully fledged treatise.)
Articles, however, often travel in herds. Indeed, the bound volumes that hold back issues of magazines - and the digital equivalent thereof - will often provide readers with a series of articles that, when read in sequence, offer benefits comparable to those provided by a well-wrought book. Better yet, the set of articles on related subjects may also include a variety of viewpoints, thereby providing a more comprehensive view than any single author can provide. Best of all, the reader who works his way through bound volumes of a journal in chronological order will often encounter a great many advertisements, artifacts of place and time which often provide the sort of background information that, though often useful and invariably interesting, rarely finds its way into the pages of a seamless tome.
For Further Reading
