But throughout that time there was always a Grub Street that would have been just as thrilled as the RH editorial team had they gotten news of a sudden bump in sales of anything. You can’t compare a reading community interested in Novangelis with the mood of a publishing team. They are simply two different beasts. And, as students of publishing in the Republic of Letters have shown, those publishers were savvy in exactly the way Peter must be today — networking, making connections, promoting younger scholars to older more famous mentors. In other words, within their world, they were skilled at monetizing their pages.

All this said, I think when Peter said his goal is to publish books that matter and not lose money, I think that is tragic. The negative aim — that pit of doom University Presses circle around — really does not in any significant way fit with the first aim. And that is worth discussing.

Anyone who has lived through the transformation of daily life wrought by the likes of email is bound to understand, at least in part, what Dimock is getting at. In little more than a decade, we’ve gone from the heady heyday of extensive and frequently lengthy email exchanges (both personally and on substantively defined listservs) to the age of the BlackBerry and the T1, in which many of us exchange hundreds of emails a day, most of them furiously pounded out in the clipped, short clauses of e-speak. Life is busy, as the Sprint multi-taskers ad would have it, but some people—ie, those with a good handheld (and “Sprint speed”), though probably not a whole lot of “contemplative time”—seem to get more done than others.

Among scholars and their fellow travelers, responses to this reality have varied. On one end of the spectrum are those who have completely embraced the new technology and its omnipresent place in their lives. Count among these the colleague who recently assured me that while he was busy traveling and would be touching down in Helsinki before arriving in New York for an SSRC meeting, he would nonetheless be readily available along the way, since “BlkBerry sleeps by my side.” On the other end of the spectrum are those colleagues who are very nearly impossible to reach by email—because, for instance, they check it once a week during their “office hours,” wedging their hurriedly drafted responses in between meetings with students and dealing with that mail still kind enough to come in an envelope capable of being torn open. Most of us probably tend more towards the former pole, but at least some of those who lean towards the latter are nonetheless to be commended (even if they do annoy us by not responding immediately to our variously worded, and repeated, email entreaties). They are, after all, holding out for one version of the scholar’s dream, the situation of skholè, that unfettered free time in which we (and our time) are freed, as Pierre Bourdieu once put it, “from the urgencies of the world.”

Most of these hold outs, however, appear in my admittedly non-random sample to be tenured faculty members, well ensconced in one elite institution or another, with the freedom to not even know the meaning of an email bankruptcy, much less be forced to contend with the consequences of having to declare one. So what about the rest of us? We’re the somewhat guilty would-be readers that Peter mentions in his post, whose Amazon wish lists—if all of our book-buying dreams were suddenly to come true—would have us surrounded by stacks and stacks of carefully crafted and laboriously researched books, their pristinely preserved or merely half-turned pages serving only to reinforce our sense of despair at all that we might have known. Our best hope might be the convulsive gift visited upon the protagonist in Coppola’s (and before that Eliade’s) Youth Without Youth, Dominic Matei, who having been struck by lightning was subjected to a change in ontological status that enabled him to completely assimilate all the knowledge lodged in books simply by passing his hand over them (whether he was also thereby able to make use of their “emancipative potential” is, I suppose, another matter).

While we wait around for our own bolt of lightning to strike, we might comfort ourselves by remembering that there are good reasons to be engaged with and by “the urgencies of the world”—and yes, this means that some books will go unread. Whether some books ought to go unread, or even unwritten, is yet another important question, and one that I hope contributors to this blog will eventually take up. We certainly might begin by acknowledging—scandalous as it may seem to say in a world in which everyone is (and indeed must be) a published author—that not all books are created equal. Yet what about very good books, like the one Peter Dimock mentions, books that deserve to be read? Well, we’ll just have to blog about them, of course!

That said, I will continue to follow the conversations on this blog to learn more. Thank you!