Letter to Readers

Begging your indulgence

Dear Readers,

Begging your indulgence, I would like to propose a little pause. My idea is to take a two week “company retreat” (just me), to look inside the gears here at Book Post—something I usually don’t have time to do—and think through a shift in our cadence to adapt to the evolving moment.

The Book Post we have before us is not quite the one I pictured when I began in 2018, after nearly a year of scheming. I had my eye on a more popular medium that drew new readers into the world of books; you can see that orientation if you look at the early installments. I hoped that, in a small way, alongside other initiatives, delivering little book reviews into people’s daily lives might restore—even broaden!—some of the country’s commitment to informed discourse and culturally rich expression. As I worked on the Notebooks for you over the years this vision developed. I had a growing impression that a corrosive estrangement in America is being aggravated by conglomerated media and a technological infrastructure that pitches to the figment of a mass audience—a generalized reader conjured by easy resentments and stereotypes—rather than individual human needs. I wanted to work in at least a small cultural corner of the civic project envisioned by writers like Eric Klinenberg and Robert Putnam, the project of building common space for human-scale gathering—in our case, gathering of the mind. Hence Book Post’s preoccupation with bookstores, libraries, small publishing, local in-person reading. It is an old argument, one I often had with my friend Joseph, whether more culture takes people in the direction of more empathy, understanding, tolerance, wisdom. I’m not sure it does, and I see the potential sentimentalizing in that argument, a defanging of literature. I favor answering it in the plural: put the culture, or cultures, out there, and let them do their magic. Let the labor of weighing them be the shared project, even as it is a solitary one. Perhaps mediating the solitary and the shared is the labor of culture. Perhaps fidelity to both the solitary and the shared is its test. Creating a field for appraisal and growth rather than advancing a single argument is a gesture of faith in human capacities. As an editor (a bookseller, a publisher, a librarian) one commits to the work, not to its fruits.