- The Writers Voice -

[Harry]

Books of the Month Club

Harry Buschman


These are books.

People used to read books, page by page. That’s how they were made – publishers put them all together, bound them together along the edge and they made a book. People carried them around, sat down on a bark bench or in a comfortable chair at home until something else got their attention and then they’d forget them.


They’d pick the book up again later and read on from where they stopped reading before. They’d read all sorts of things, romantic novels, sales reports, instruction manuals, bibles… just about everything anyone ever wrote before. Right or wrong.

It went on for years. Nobody could possibly buy all the books, brochures catalogs and whatnot that were put into print, so they built libraries to hold them all and hired librarians to catalog them and put them on shelves so people could find them and take them home, (if they’d promise to bring them back in two weeks.)

The popularity of books convinced everyone to think they could write too, and within a generation or so, readers became writers and the result was that libraries were swamped with books, everyone was writing and no one was reading. The picture above shows the result. Libraries finally refused to accept new deliveries of books and filled their shelves with magazines, newspapers, CD’s, audio books for the blind and outlets for people with Kindles and other devices to download them and read them at home.

It was a stopgap solution at best. People were so busy writing there was no time for reading. People no longer read. They wrote much like prehistoric man – on anything that could be written on, and hoped that eventually someone would come along and read it.

Trouble is, no one could could read any more.






















hh suche heaving waves on the vast, ink-black ocean sent a salty spray over the proud bow of the three-masted ship, leaving beads of water on the exposed alabaster skin above the bodice of the tall, raven-haired woman who stood sobbing on the deck, her salty tears mixing with the storm-tossed sea."e heaving waves on the vast, ink-black ocean sent a salty spray over the proud bow of the three-masted ship, leaving beads of water on the exposed alabaster skin above the bodice of the tall, raven-haired woman who stood sobbing on the deck, her salty tears mixing with the storm-tossed sea."
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We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Ernest Hemingway

[shadowlight]

Wow, Harry, this made me sad, because it some ways it is very true. When I talk to people, or listen to my podcasts and people say that they are reading a book or books, they are many times listening to audio books. That isn't reading. Very sad. I love to read, but have to struggle to make time to do so. Thinking about a library coming to this kind of end makes me incredibly sad. Thanks for making me think, my friend.

God bless,
Marlicia
with God all things are possible
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Be patient with me. Like any good story, I'm a work in progress.