And, looking back down the long avenue of this century, you count the graves of the doomsayers but the book drives on into the third millennium. It is a triumph of fact over theory, of the empirical over the abstract, and as such it must give a particular pleasure to the British, because, in theory, the book has not stood a chance, not a hope, not a prayer. And yet in this empirical country it thrives. One quick way to defend the health of books today is to point out that a great number of very bright people are still choosing to write them. But if you are a theoretical reader of the century and take notice of all the convergent runes and believe in systems and processes and progressions and such, then indeed the book ought to be dead, cremated and buried.
Films ought to have cut the book off at the knees.
For the act of communal seeing which until very recently films always demanded would surely take away the time necessary for private reading. While, it was also argued, the films themselves told stories, adventure stories, detective stories, war stories, romances, comedies, histories, tragedies, musicals - a bigger range than Polonius ever dreamt of. And these, projected magically across a darkened theatre, the beam of light infiltrated by cigarette smoke, brought us all our dreams 40 feet high in a way surely books could not match. And if films did not deliver the death blow, then there was radio, which swept into the mid century and on certain channels provided alternative books - drama, documentaries, discussions. Happily moored to the wireless, the mid-century generations could be given direct access to words and speech as direct and dramatic in the public sense as at any time since Periclean Athens, and as compelling as any tale told by an Indian story teller.