Reluctant Capitalists [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 Commercial Culture and Its Discontents In the early 1960s, Edward Shils wrote an essay examining "the bookshop in America." Shils praised the bookseller, a special kind of person who willingly forgoes a lucrative salary simply to be around books. The bookseller, he noted, performs an important public service, running an enterprise with a unique role in the reproduction and distribution of culture: A good bookshop blows the breeze of contemporaneity on one; it puts one "in touch"; it permits first contacts and offers prospects of greater intensity. It is a place for intellectual conviviality, and it has the same value as conversation, not as a "civilized art" but as a necessary part of the habitat of a lively intelligence in touch with the world.' Yet, despite the bookshop's value for American society, Shils believed that the retail book trade was in a very sorry state, and its future looked only worse. The problem, he argued, was that Americans showed little interest in reading, and publishers often b3rpassed bookstores to sell directly to the public — a set of conditions that only compounded the already unprofitable character of bookselling. As a result, most bookshops specialized in bestsellers and other popular titles and few carried a satisfactory and varied selection — not a good thing, as Shils warned: