It seems that there is an academic going by the dubious name of Joe Moron working at a place called Liverpool John Moores University in England (a jaw cruncher of which I had hitherto been blissfully unaware). He has established a 'charity' entitled the Society of Unread Authors (SUA) with the aim of getting woefully unread personages to start to read those publications that have never been read. He wishes to "support all those writers who are left impoverished and traumatised by failing to acquire a readership." This leaves me intrigued and puzzled in roughly equal measure.
While I have a visceral aversion to 'statistics' with their frightful numerical symmetries, he uses such devices to tell an alarming tale. He claims that 200,000 titles are published annually in the UK (he only seems interested in this one country) and 800 appeared on a single day in October as a prelude to Christmas 'sales', most of which were written by someone called Dan Brown or even the disturbing-sounding Ant and Dec. The sheer weight of this publishing pushes other, allegedly worthy authors aside; it seems that they cannot in any way compete with celebrity-obsessed trivia and glutinous 'pot-boilers'. Thousands upon thousands of books are simply not being read at all.
He posits a dual strategy:
- Recruit enforcers to coerce people into reading the books they buy and ignore, paying them to do so if necessary;
- Delay publication of many unsuitable books with key words in their title - he cites Angels, Little Book Of, Loose Women, Jeremy Kyle (whoever that is) etc. This should allow people time to read the books they should be reading but, for whatever reason, are not.
I am perplexed by his passion. I myself am no stranger to being an unread author. Indeed I am proud to note that there are few with the stamina or intellect to plough through the dense prolixity of the muscular prose in my published work, not to mention my customarily opaque yet compendious footnoted asides. I am satisfied that my oeuvre is read in the 'right circles', by eminent people with the wit and perspicacity to learn from my cogent analysis. So why should it matter that all these thousands of books be read, even by people completely inadequate to the task?
He feels that this will "enrich our cultural life". I am by no means so sure. Imagine if we unleashed all 'sorts' of menial personages and paid them to read. Who then would empty our garbage, serve our meals or repair our machines? I shudder in trepidation.
We also need to address the question of why these books deserve to be read. I vividly recall the gruesome experience of being trapped in an elevator with a brutish economist who mercilessly harangued me on something he termed 'supply and demand'. Now, using this frightfully simplistic taxonomy, can we not go so far as to suggest that there are simply too many books for people to read? Indeed, there may not actually be that many personages capable of reading them, unless they contain gaudy pictures or came accompanied with coloring sets. If we are producing hundreds of thousands of books a minute when there are so few learned persons actually fitted to read them, then disaster looms.
No, it is better to simply stand back and let the market do its work. We cannot compel or bribe unsuitable persons to read when they are better suited to more menial operations. Likewise, any 'commercially minded' publisher will surely balk at churning out millions of texts when he discovers to his chagrin that nobody is actually buying them. Government intervention, forcing all 'types' of people to read to set targets and quotas, simply will not work and should be resisted on principle. It is but a short step to a bureaucratic strangulation of freedoms and the Ministry of Compulsory Lexicography. Is it not better that uneducated persons are reading trash than nothing at all? So, let them do as they will, even reading this so-called Ant and his doubtlessly worthy colleague Dec. Things will out in the end.
