A whole page of print now intimidates many people, and not just the type of people whom a page of print has always intimidated; at a Paris airport there was, until two or three years ago, a very good bookshop, but it has now been replaced by a pharmacy. It is not that passengers read books that they have downloaded on their electronic devices; on the contrary, they play games or watch films on them, or leaf through glossy magazines in a desultory way. And literary pages in French newspapers and magazines now review comic-strip books with as much seriousness as any other type of book. Adults are the new children.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Intimidated by the Printed Page
Theodore Dalrymple "A Quick Word," Taki's Magazine (November 7, 2015):