Letter to Dana Gioia
Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

Dear Mr. Gioia,

Just as Whitman sought to match in his poetry “the vitality and freshness of American democracy,” our books must match the vitality and freshness of our multimedia age. And that vitality, that freshness, is multisensory. It can never be captured by black ink on white paper. So long as we try to promote the act of reading old style, black rectangular text, we are missing the very heart of what it means to be alive today, as readers living in an age of such remarkable new technologies. We cannot foster a vibrant culture of literature and the arts if we insist that such literature and such art look as it has always looked.

I have concluded that the trends discussed in Reading at Risk are impossible to reverse, both in the inner city where I have worked for 13 years, and in the suburbs, where I live. Efforts to promote old style, black and white reading are doomed to fail because they cannot compete with the multisensory world we now inhabit. But there is good news here: the trends relate only to black and white, old style reading. The solution is to foster an environment in which writers, teachers, and publishers are encouraged to create a new kind of reading experience that can effectively compete with television, movies, and video games.

More than one reviewer has pointed out that I advocate not so much a new way of reading and writing, but in fact a return to our visual roots. What I call “designer writing” is far from experimental. One of the main points of Goodbye Gutenberg is to show that most of the great literary cultures have a rich visual history - a history that was neglected after the printing press, but one that we can now return to with our new technologies.

You will see in the chapter on ebooks, I am a passionate defender of print culture. We are the first generation in 500 years with the capacity to create printed books as strikingly beautiful as medieval illuminated manuscripts. For us not to avail ourselves of this new opportunity, for us to continue to fight the inevitable trends and insist in a parochial way that print must remain a black and white experience, would be even more tragic than the findings of the recent NEA report.

Albert Einstein once said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” We cannot expand our readership in the old, black and white way. We must begin to recognize that the Gutenberg style book represents a very particular – and very peculiar – way of reading and writing. It emerged in a very specific time and place, for technological and economic reasons. It certainly did not emerge for its beauty.

A major publishing house recently surveyed 500 adolescents, asking them why they don’t read the Bible. “Because it’s icky looking,” they said. Icky looking. If the books of our age are remembered for anything, it will be for their ugliness. Publishers Weekly compiled a list of the best selling book for each year from 1900 to 1999. All of them, without exception, are in the standard black and white format. Compare this to a list of the most popular books created between 1300 and 1399. The reverse is true: just about all of them were beautifully illuminated in color. Here we are, captains of the most advanced technological civilization in history, and our books are among the ugliest of any era.

Goodbye Gutenberg suggests we marry the visual beauty of the past with today’s latest technologies to create a new kind of book. Above all, to create a new kind of reader.

Warmly,

Valerie Kirschenbaum

A copy of this letter was sent to Mark Bauerlein, Director of Research & Analysis at the NEA

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