How we devalue the book

Literary culture is under threat from quarters meant to celebrate and promote it

FORTY YEARS AND MORE AGO, when a job in publishing seemed a slightly less awful prospect than some of the other options available, The Secret Author once attended a careers talk addressed by a representative of one of the big London outfits. It was a deeply unedifying experience in which that age-old question about the future of the book was turned on its head to yield up a much starker enquiry: did the book even have a future? An hour later, we all wandered out into the grim Oxford twilight convinced that while the survival of English Literature hung by a thread, there might just be employment for one or two of us selling educational textbooks in Nigeria. All that was back in the early 1980s when gloom hung over…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2025

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