Written by Richard Rapaport   

No surprise, but leave it to The New Yorker to first have recognized the fading of the flower of American literacy. That glimpse into the tenuous future of the written and read word came in the form of an October, 1993 New Yorker cartoon by San Francisco Bay Area artist, Mike Twohy. Twohy’s brilliant conceit was a “Main Street” American storefront with a sign in the window advertising, simply, tragically, “Books on Paper.” Ouch.

The timing of Twohy’s cartoon might have been seen to lend an alternative interpretation; a comment perhaps on the changes wrought by the then newly-digitizing American book world coming into focus as Amazon.com and other nascent online booksellers. But wait. For the moment, stipulate with me that Twohy had captured something even more interesting and important percolating out of 1990’s America; Perhaps even something like a shift in our cultural language; a reduction in the book-sized, literature-shaped acuity that was so central in shaping the powerful, if now under-a-cloud, Western Civ mode of organization and thought that owes so much to the rise of written word.

The decline in, at least, the quality of America’s literary production identified by Twohy in his cartoon, is easily demonstrated by a glance at the New York Times Best Seller book list from that last week in October 1993. Americans were still buying and reading “Books on Paper,” but not necessarily tomes that might be considered mind-expanding in terms of the forward march of civilization.

That week’s number one work of fiction was Robert Waller’s watery “The Bridges of Madison County,” while the number one and two non-fiction works were shock-jock Howard Stern’s adolescent “Private Parts,” and “Seinlanguage,” by comedian Jerry Seinfeld, whose ‘little-ado-about-something,’ mega-hit television show was giddily marching into its fourth season. The New York Times best-seller list even provided its own built-in explanation for this erosion of literary standards; the number seven work of non-fiction that same week was Peter D. Kramer’s “Listening to Prozac,” the “don’t worry, be happy,” paean to chemically-encouraged stress-reduction.

Scholarly confirmation of the righteousness of Mike Twohy’s window into America’s sputtering literary soul came a decade later, in 2004, when the National Endowment of the Arts released its study, “Reading at Risk, A Survey of Literary Reading in America.” The report was released by NEA Chair, Dana Gioia at a portentous press conference held, fittingly or not, on the steps of the New York Public Library. Among the findings, was a ten-percent drop in literary readership between 1982 and 2002, a loss of more than 20-million American readers. Worse, the most precipitous decline, nearly 30%, came among young readers. At the press conference, Gioia decried what she saw as nothing less “than a national reading crisis,” reflecting what she called, “a general collapse in advanced literacy” and a consequent impoverishment of “both culture and civic life.”

Another, though at the time, less well-considered finding was that in the face of across-the-board readership declines, came a surprising 30% increase in the number of people engaged in “creative writing.” What made this so creepy was the corresponding decline in numbers of people actually studying prose and poetry before hanging out their literary shingle. One explanation seemed to lay in the rise of a culture of unfettered self-expression in which eased standards and the rise of Internet, enabled the American every-person to call themselves, without shame, defensiveness or irony, “writer,” “poet,” or “artist.”

In 2007, the NEA’s Gioia was back with another compendium revealing increasing shellshock on the “Books On Paper” front. Called “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequences,” the study found that only thirty-percent of thirteen year-olds read every day, fewer than twenty-percent of seventeen-year-olds read for pleasure, and that fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds daily watched two-hours of television a day, while reading little more than seven minutes. Not coincidentally, this was about the time it took to master “Halo 3,” one of 2007’s most popular computer games.

Nor was it merely the ubiquity of the personal computer that portended the decline and fall of literacy in America. Clues into the decreasing cultural attention span abounded even in the corridors of some of the nation’s most self-reverential “keepers of the national discourse.” Among them, National Public Radio which, in 2009, inaugurated an “All Things Considered” contest called “Three-Minute Fiction.” In it, listeners were encouraged to write and submit “novels” of fewer than 600 words. The contest judged by various well-regarded literary critics seemed an especially good gig, considering that works of “creative writing,” could be read and judged in three minutes or less.

Yet who is not to say that literacy, the fading world of “Books on Paper,” is not itself merely a temporary condition; an interregnum between the mid-14th Century invention of moveable type and the early-21st Century triumph of computer-enabled, poly-media. It is in that latter realm, after all, in which the effort necessary to master “Books on Paper” are so satisfyingly evaded in the all-absorbing, kaleidoscopic universe of walking, talking, self-affirming, if lip-moving and knuckle-dragging, social media.

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Richard Rapaport is a San Francisco Bay Area writer.As far as he can tell, he does not move his lips when he reads. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .