"The Late Age of Print" by Ted Striphas

 

Striphas stakes his claim in the “moment of transition” camp. We are on the verge of something, but it’s no great crisis. A softened Marxism underlies this view, and the book’s title riffs on the already-coined “late age of capitalism,” a moment when capitalism is  triumphant yet decadent. “Late Age of Print”  both “underscores the enduring role of books”  and “draws attention to the ways in which the social, economic, and material coordinates of books have been changing in relation to other media, denser forms of industrial organization, shifting patterns of work and leisure, [and] new laws governing commodity ownership and use” (3).

 

Striphas’s book will frustrate a casual reader seeking panaceas or prophecies, but it will reward anyone, particularly those in the book indsutry, seeking to better understand the evolution of books in America over the past hundred years. Books, Striphas reminds us, have always been commodities. They were one of the first commercial Christmas presents, (7) and, after the stock market crash of 1929, were bolstered by a marketing campaign to sell build-in bookcases in new houses, a brilliant  “if you build them they will come” campaign to convince aspirational Americans to show their learning off to dinner guests by buying books with pretty spines.

 

Striphas covers e-books, which he fears will intensify the commodification of books, and  big-box retailers, which he argues are more important to rural and working-class readers than the anti-chain stores camp acknowledge.  In a chapter on online bookselling, Striphas takes Amazon.com to task for its union-busting labor practices.  Oprah book club, he rightfully acknowledges in another chapter, offers women a non-threatening space to explore books’ lessons in life. His chapter on pirate copies of Harry Potter books takes glee in how consumers have circumvented that tightly controlled franchise.  Readers can resist attempts to control books, and by extension, their readers, when those books are important enough (or when the need to find out what happens next is so strong you refuse to wait for the authorized version). 

 

Striphas combines scholarship on book history with archival research, and includes a long section on an obscure, still relevant (and unfortunately named) Cheney Report from 1932 that implored the publishing industry to stop “relying on intuition to guide important business, editorial, and purchasing decisions rather than operating on a scientifically sound, statistically driven ‘fact basis’” (87-88). 

 

The Late Age of Print is not beach reading, but Striphas keeps the tone light and his sentences clear. This book is an important hedge against the disturbing presentism in the hastily written “death of print” screeds being uploaded daily. Admirably, he and his publisher, Columbia University Press, managed to release the book without too much lag time between production and publication, providing a rare example of a scholarly book timely enough to weigh in on pressing issue (pun intended). 

 

“The Late of Age Print” is a blog, too, and you can read Striphas’ take on the most recent news about the fate of books here:  http://www.thelateageofprint.org/.