``Writing has never been capitalism's thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate. The death of writing is like the death of God or the death of the father: the thing was settled a long time ago...'' Eric Beck
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Well, there was the thing itself, which was far more simple to understand. Printing and the book was the first of the industrial mass produced things. There is a picture of a library interior that Michangelo designed, with a view of what going to a library might have been like in the 13th-16thC. The `books' where the size of small suit cases and chained to the reading bench. The `hardcovers' looked to be made of wood covered in leather and were about an inch thick. Pretty hard to run out the door with something like that...
Sometime in the nineties most of my books were paperback and were falling apart because they were twenty or thirty years old. So I set out to replace them with hardbound versions, which were available used from local bookstores. From then on I bought hardbound if I wanted to keep it. Some books like Anti-Oedipus I knew I had to read, but had no intention of returning to, since they were artifacts of an era that was already escaping into the air as they blossomed on reading lists. So most of my postmodern collection are paperback. And then too, most of my collection of LS is in paperback. He can't possibly know. It's a symbolic gesture.
There were significant changes in production over the decades, first the size of the type, then the ever increasing crappiness of the binding, and then the shittiness of the paper. In other words, you can physically experience the deterioration of the book. The layout designs, once liberated from editor-author control, and turned over to contract really went to hell.
After I finished Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities when it first came out, I nailed it to a 2x4 and put it on the back portch to face the morning sun and bake for ten years. Icon for the Eighties. It was payback for The Painted Word. Sure they're funny, and close enough to kill, but always from the wrong side. The self-deception that Wolfe is Zola, is worth at least a one act play.
This reminds me, after looking through some Kindle ads, maybe I should wait a few more months until they show up at the recycling center an get one for the Wolfe treatment. Probably use wood screws instead of nails... cast in a polyester resin block.
CG