I tripped over a statistic today related to my recent entry on declining culture. From Irving Louis Horowitz's lengthy and amazingly prescient 1983 article, "Printed Words, Computers, and Democratic Societies," in The Virginia Quarterly Review:
"In 1950...11,022 books were published in the United States....In 1979...45,182."
For 2005, 172,000.
It's amazing to think that just 55 years ago there were only 11,022 unique titles in the publishing industry in the U.S. Does that make it easier for a "classic" to get onto John Updike's piano teacher's shelf? I suspect it would, because there's a smaller pool of books from which Americans can choose to read. So perhaps it was easier for the cream to rise back then. The U.S. population, by contrast, only doubled between 1950 and 2005, while books increased by a factor of about 15.
I wish I could find out what the fiction to non-fiction ratio is for those earlier numbers, but I wonder if those stats are even available. Harder still would be figuring out, among fiction titles, the ratio of crap to books of literary value. Oh well.
I highly recommend reading Horowitz's article, by the way - it's deep, thoughtful and impressive in that it almost predicts things like the Internet as we know it, Wikipedia, and blogging. It's like William Gibson in a college professor's tweed jacket.
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you should read "Killing Yourself To Live" by Chuck Klosterman. Sure, it's not a book of astounding literary value, but as a musician and a pop culture lover, surely you would enjoy the book. The guy used to write for Spin, and that's actually what the book is based on. It's one of my faves.
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