Life is short and literature is long....

Life is short and literature is long. This conviction was everywhere in evidence last weekend at the second annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The thirst of the crowd (estimated at more than 100,000, or 10% of the newspaper’s daily circulation) for the life of the mind was unmistakable. For some, it was a revelation. Who knew that in Los Angeles, where, famously, people make a fetish of the sun and the surf, there were so many folks who would rather spend their leisure time away from their StairMasters and lap pools, reading?

Writers from Frank McCourt to Michael Crichton, from Garry Wills to Mary Higgins Clark, were uniformly impressed--indeed, overwhelmed--by the number and festive seriousness of people who gathered together from all walks of life and all corners of this far-flung city. A. Scott Berg, for one, born and raised in Los Angeles and the author of acclaimed biographies of Max Perkins and Samuel Goldwyn, said it was “the most significant cultural event to occur in my lifetime in Los Angeles.” He was not alone in that sentiment.

It’s enough to give one hope. At a time when serious trade book publishing faces the most acute structural crisis in American history, the plain fact is that more and more people are crowding into the bookstores. Despite all the blather about the Internet (one of the greatest time-wasters ever invented), the book has yet to be supplanted as the best repository of deep knowledge. It is in these simple rectangular objects--portable and user-friendly--that news of our educational, scientific, cultural, historical and imaginative life can be found. People, I suspect, will always respond to the sensual aspect of books. Fear of the electronic tsunami is misplaced. After all, television didn’t banish radio: It simply gave people another option. People in the future will probably continue to read their morning paper, tune in to NPR in the car on their way to work, listen to their favorite music on CDs, go online to research a term paper and curl up at night with a good book.

To be sure, the arts of reading are under siege. The distractions and seductions of modern life are everywhere. A virtual hurricane of information swirls about us, but, strangely, people know less and less. Information becomes abundant, wisdom scarce. What is most threatened, as George Steiner once remarked, is “the category of reading in the old, archaic, private, silent sense.”

For this kind of reading is a profoundly antisocial act: It cannot be done in concert with friends; it is not a branch of the leisure industry, whose entertainments, whether video or computer or sports or rock ‘n’ roll, can be enjoyed in the mass. How many times, for instance, did you ever say as a child: “Leave me alone! Can’t you see I’m reading?” The fear here is that reading, in the classic sense, may become, as Steiner put it, “as specialized a skill and avocation as it was in the scriptoria and libraries of the monasteries during the so-called Dark Ages. The wish to attend to a demanding text, to master the grammar, the arts of memory, the tactics of repose and concentration, may once more become the practice of an elite, of a mandarinate of silences.”

The terrible irony, of course, is that at the dawn of an era of almost magical technology with a potential of deepening the implicit democratic promise of mass literacy, we also totter on the edge of an abyss of profound cultural neglect. The culture of the country is increasingly enrolled in the junk cults of celebrity, sensationalism and gossip.

And yet, and yet. Walk into any of the vast emporiums operated by, say, Barnes & Noble or Borders or any of the multifaceted independent stores, and you find a cornucopia of riches. You would think we were living at the apotheosis of our culture. Never before in the whole of human history has more good literature, attractively presented, sold for still reasonably low prices, been available to so many people. You would need several lifetimes over doing nothing but lying prone in a semi-darkened room with only a lamp for illumination just to make your way through the good books that are on offer.

Still, I am daily convinced that this apparent utopia masks a bitter truth at the heart of trade book publishing: It is increasingly difficult for editors to acquire--and publishers to successfully publish--serious works of both nonfiction and fiction. This is so for several reasons. The 25-year trend, well-known and much decried, toward the conglomeration of everything, has now reached critical mass, leaving fewer booksellers dominating more of the market and fewer book publishers left standing in the arena. Each is held hostage to those front-of-store sales by the Danielle Steels and Stephen Kings--God bless them!--needed in ever greater numbers so that the Riggio brothers, who preside over Barnes & Noble, can meet the mortgage payments on the vast acreage they’ve occupied to house the complete works of Nietzsche. And it is not, alas, sales of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” that is paying the rent.

Other factors include the short-term bottom-line mentality that ruthlessly insists that each and every book be a “profit center”; the speed-up of production, which leaves editors less time to genuinely edit; and the generally debased culture of the country. Taken together, these factors threaten to leave us in a condition not unlike that which greeted the Chinese at the end of the Cultural Revolution: ignorant of tradition, contemptuous of habits of quality and excellence, unable to distinguish good from bad.

But perhaps this is too gloomy and bleak a view. It certainly did not seem to be the view of the tens of thousands who thrilled to the very idea of books and who arrived at UCLA filled with infectious and obvious enthusiasm and passion. In a region like Southern California, made up of large city-states, none of which boasts a town square, the Festival of Books provided a de facto forum in which like-minded people could congregate.

The hunger for community was palpable. It is the same ethos that has impelled the phenomenal growth of Barnes & Noble, Borders and, yes, Starbucks. These stores--and the vital 66 branches of the Los Angeles Public Library--are the ganglia of civil society. Each provides a place where people can safely come together to meet one another and to carry on a conversation over coffee and print--print of all kinds: newspapers, magazines, books. The wired world will never completely replace the human need to encounter other humans face to face.

The people who came to the Festival of Books last weekend know this. They know that without books--without literacy--the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs. Late Saturday morning, as the crowd began to swell, I overheard a woman ask a UCLA police officer if he expected trouble. He looked at her quizzically and said, “Ma’am, books are like Kryptonite to gangs.” There was more wisdom in that cop’s remark than in a thousand academic monographs on how to reform the criminal justice system. What he knew, of course, is what all societies since time immemorial have known: If you want to reduce crime, make sure your children know how to read. Civilization is built on a foundation made of books.