Gathered there, either by the right hand of fate, or the left hand of chance, those legions of books make up a geography, where far and near run in circles, and a history, careering back and forth between the most distant and most recent past.

We enter those times and those spaces, which create an atmosphere at once peaceful and intense. Everything ranged along the wide shelves and set out in long corridors forms a maze of works and titles through which we walk in a lucid hallucination in which consciousness takes possession of itself so as to become, as phenomenology envisages, the consciousness of the world.

As we scan the sequence of spines and covers, the propagation of words and images, the insistent presence of digits and signs, the proliferation of typographical matrices, typefaces and font sizes, the difference of papers, sizes, formats and colours, the variety of printing, binding and stitching, we feel the material gravitation of a universe in ceaseless expansion and uncontrolled and all-conquering growth.

As we take in the accumulation of volumes, the multiplicity of disciplines, the multiplication of genres, the abundance of authors, the succession of eras and epochs, the diversity of styles and currents, the plurality of languages and specialist languages, we experience a shiver of fright similar to that which Blaise Pascal confessed to feeling when faced with the eternal silence of the infinite spaces of the universe.

We walk around the shop and we are in many times and many worlds, because we are inside a time made of other times and inside a world, the map of which is meticulously drawn by journeys that have reached us from other worlds.

We enter there and our time and our world are like the colours of a Pantone chart consisting of profusion and possibilities, of varieties and variations, of contrasts and approximations, of chromatic scales and tonal gradations.

In a second-hand bookshop, the old and the new find a common home, as do quantity and quality, the large and the small, the good and the bad, the inspired and the mediocre, safety and danger, meditation and uproar, concord and conflict, war and truce, love and hate, reality and imagination, haste and leisure, the expiring and the inspiring, the known and the unknown, the sublime and the vulgar, salvation and downfall.

Each second-hand bookshop is an atlas of places, a stage for characters, a thermometer of temperatures, an archive of evidence, a laboratory for experiments, and inventory of documents, a register of names, a museum of monuments, a catalogue of works, a collection of events, an index of moods and modes, a store of wonders.

It is a set of exercises in paying attention, a showcase of temptations, a garden of delights, a cemetery of tombs, a mine field, a school of learning, a surgery for deciphering, a collection of remains, an altar of auras, a cubbyhole of curiosities, a domain of demonstrations, a funfair of attractions, a fortune-teller’s tent.

Now, it is in a large, ugly building, where we go even without wanting to, and there we find one of those bookshops to which the escalators or lifts convey us in a repetitive and mechanical movement that saves us fatigue, and gives us tedium in return.

We walk in and enter a marketing competition, a vanity fair, a stagnant spectacle in a commercial depot, in a market of genres, in a technological, graphic and typographical Disneyland.

Instead of finding the books we want to find, we find screens, equipment, household appliances, utensils, apparatus, devices, machines, tools, accessories, gadgets.

Before we find the books on which the wisdom of centuries has conferred regard, credit and confidence, we have to cut through a jungle of triviality and advertising, the latest bestsellers for easy and utilitarian reading: entertainment, self-help, light literature (what a contradiction in terms!). Or else treatises on cheap esotericism, alternative medicine, healthy eating and effective diets, guides to staying young forever, handbooks for being successful in life and getting rich quick, textbooks on how to become a genius, works that teach us how to be leaders, how to beat off the competition and win, how to love ourselves, compilations of un-funny jokes, novels by non-writers, puerile ‘romantic’ fiction, immature porno-erotic tales, historical biographies and novels with no historical basis, narcissistic political and personal self-promotion, A-list to Z-list TV personalities and social media influencers sharing their boring lives and giving us tips on how to be better at cooking, dressing ourselves, doing our make-up, sleeping, travelling and loving, or promising to teach us what they don’t know.

In these platforms for merchandise, each square metre is allocated and withdrawn, granted or denied, to each ‘product’, in line with sales figures and returns. If poetry doesn’t sell, there is no room for poetry. If essayists have poor sales, little space is allocated to essayists. If novels which are not novels sell well, they are rewarded with investment, prime positioning, posters and screens to entice the customer.

The sales figures dictate all the other figures and determine the business strategy and logistics. A book about leisure is, primarily, a business venture involving a book on leisure.

What is more, publishing has all but become a monopoly which has expanded its domains and control over every aspect and stage of the long journey from author to reader.

There is no room for anything unexpected, impromptu, or surprising. As a result, the inevitable has taken over: the biggest space, pride of place, the most eye-catching display, the most visible showcase is for the bestsellers, or those vying to be bestsellers.

So no one is surprised, or taken aback, or worried, or even indignant to see Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or Eça de Queirós’s The Maias surrounded, besieged, asphyxiated, by books written (or often merely signed) by the media’s favourite TV presenter or by the most undistinguished news anchor.

All’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare said, without imagining that, in our times, being well and ending well is ending by leaving money in the till, buying books of humiliating mediocrity, but which, for the buyer, led on by the media and cultural environment, are not infrequently regarded as on the same level as, or even superior to, Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, which those readers have never read, and never will.

This premeditated mystification, this planned investment in jumbling up values and levels, has unstoppable consequences throughout the ‘bookselling business chain’: the big bookshops display what sells best, the big publishers publish what the bookshops display, many authors write for what the publishers publish and the bookshops display, the big newspapers talk about what is widely displayed, published and sold in large quantities.

There is no need to cite George Steiner alerting us to the barbarism of ignorance, or Umberto Eco warning us of the torrents of imbecility on social media, to be aware of the world we are building and the consequences of this at every level: from populism as the victorious political prototype and the new cultural Petri dish, through to the rise of the European far right and narcissistic and chauvinist intolerance, not to mention the contempt for any learning that cannot be immediately turned to profit or practical use, or at least provide entertainment.

The idea here is not to set up an implacable moralism of reading, brandishing, like a spear, a Puritan code of ethics for readers. There is no thought of compiling a kind of new Index Expurgatorius or Index Librorum Prohibitorum of mediocrity and vulgarity, taking a censorious, prohibitive or moralising view, as a reminder of what the Catholic Church imposed as from the sixteenth century, even before, but above all after, the Council of Trent, and which lasted in all its imperious plenitude until the papacy of Pope Paul VI, who only abolished it in 1966, there remaining to this day, in respect of books, arrangements for moral and religious oversight which partially substituted them and which, every now and then, are still used.

Down the ages and among many other books, this centuries-old blacklist (and this is where the expression originates) featured the works of Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Kepler, Spinoza, Locke, Diderot, Pascal, Hobbes, Descartes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume and Kant. And later, Casanova, Sade, Dumas, Defoe, Victor Hugo, Zola, Stendhal, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Anatole France, Balzac and Renan. Moving into the twentieth century, Sartre, Gide, Graham Green, Moravia, Kazantzakis and Simone de Beauvoir.

Nor is the aim to advocate a watchful and dirigiste moralism of reading, in the name of safeguarding cultural standards. Everyone reads what they like and accepts the respective responsibility (or irresponsibility) and consequence (or inconsequence).

Instead, what we need is to be aware of the deterministic and straitjacket- ‑like nature of the publishing and bookselling world today, of the perverse workings of the system that instituted it and the unimaginable and harmful reach of the respective mechanisms, apparatus, branches and tributaries. Bestseller lists and the veneration afforded to mediocrity feed off each other, in indecorous and not infrequently triumphant self-perpetuation.

Of course there are exceptions, but these form a brief interruption to the long and all-conquering rule. Speaking of exceptions, mention must be made of the bookshops, publishers, newspapers, magazines, authors and critics who hold out, persist and swim against the poisonous current that would sweep everything in its path. These heroic bookshops and publishers are often small, and brave authors, journalists and critics are almost always few in number – and to speak of this scarcity amounts to pointing the finger, identifying the symptom of an epidemic disease.

The book and books, the book within the book, the book about the book, the book that talks of the book. If, in our time with no time to have time, there was a writer who, lucidly and slowly, wrote about the book the words that it says, unsaying it, or who brings the book into our presence, by making it absent, the name by which we would know this writer is Maurice Blanchot.

As the title for one of his books about the book and literature, he chose The Book to Come, which might serve as the broad theme from which the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra originates and the moving target at which it aims.

From an invisible point in an empty space, Blanchot drew the sinuous and subtle lines of a thinking that flees from saturation, showing the signs of an impassioned and desirous knowledge which is not seeking absolution.

This writer, who almost has no recognised face other than his words of cold fire, speaks to us of Rousseau, of Joseph Joubert, of Stéphane Mallarmé, of Marcel Proust, of Antonin Artaud, of Paul Claudel, of Hermann Broch, of Robert Musil, of Henry James, of Virginia Woolf, of Hermann Hesse, of Franz Kafka, of André Gide, of André Malraux, of Samuel Beckett, of Jorge Luis Borges.

What he wrote about these great authors reaches its target so precisely, shooting arrows in an unforeseen and impetuous movement. He wrote:

For Maurice Blanchot, the destiny of the book and the destiny of literature are inseparable, becoming, to each other, a matter of intimacy and pursuit, harassment, jealousy and even a threat.

Published in 1959, The Book to Come looked at the book and its situation with an eye that saw the future in the present. In it he wrote:

With the mysterious wisdom peculiar to him, denser and more decisive that simple knowledge, Blanchot derived from his own physical invisibility (he never appeared in public and there are very, very few photographs of him) a sharp and prodigious capacity for insight – into literature, philosophy, culture and anthropology.

His meditation on the situation and status of literature and the book, with the possibility and risk of vanishing, even if not physically and as an object, is a key for us to read ourselves and to read the world and the time of our present, threatened by the future. In his work, Marshall McLuhan sharpened the prophecy of this global change.

In the days we are living through, which torment us like a storm that keeps starting up again, it is as if the book, with its stabilities and sudden shocks, were a magnet which attracts everything that happens: our technical inventions, technological wonders, bold aesthetics, ideological programmes, individual adventures and collective undertakings. Which captures our illusions, naivety, deliriums, fever dreams, hallucinations, phantoms and promised or fake utopias. Which entices our impasses, perplexities, anguishes, dissatisfactions, disorientations and dystopias. Which captures our mistakes, errors, failings, scourges, failures, fanaticisms, punishments and crimes.

To speak today of the book, its condition and its destiny, its actuality and its time to come, of the memory of what it was and of the likelihood of what it will be, is to speak of what we are, shedding on this a light which cannot be separated from the surrounding darkness.

What effects, mutations, pressures, impositions, constraints and controls will be exercised on the book, on cultural creation, on the transmission of knowledge and on the publishing industry by technological advances, educational changes, cognitive alterations, relational transformations, accelerated communications, behavioural compulsions and revolutions in the fields of the neurosciences, Artificial Intelligence or social media?

What will be the consequences for books – and for their nature and dissemination – of geopolitical disorder, the deregulation of states, ideological intimidation, political, financial and economic free-for-alls, the new law of the jungle, the ominous codes of the supremacy of inequality?

This issue of Electra, with its dossier on ‘The Book’, proposes an examination and an informed critical analysis of an industry and a trade, an output and its dissemination, a form and a content, a conservation medium and an instrument of transmission, a material object and a cultural, economic and social entity, which has been central in history and in universal civilisation.

Let us hear the masterly preacher and writer of the seventeenth century, Padre António Vieira, called by Fernando Pessoa the ‘emperor of the Portuguese language’:

The great novelist Eça de Queirós wrote:

Oscar Wilde argued:

Jorge Luis Borges recalled:

George Steiner wrote:

We have not made these citations, and many more could be included here, to confer vigour, meaning and grandiloquence on a mythology – the mythology of the book – which does not need to be added to by that which it already has in abundance.

We make them to highlight the contrast between two worlds: a world in which the book was an eminent cultural archetype, an irreplaceable civilisational paradigm, a lofty spiritual symbol (the religions of the Book), an object of worship, adoration and prestige, and that other world, that we call contemporary, which has brutally and crudely commodified the book, submitting it to a blind compulsion, consisting of voracity, vulgarity, futility, insignificance and disqualification.

Extension of memory and imagination, child of obscurity and silence, product of labour and recreation, place of continuity and rupture, witness of the identical and the different, pledge of freedom and submission, motive for lighting bonfires, for censorship and persecution, marble or bronze of the statue of glory and charcoal of the caricature of disrepute and scorn, face and mirror of the face, God and the absence of gods, the book has borne within it, over the centuries, the substance of time, the frenzy of life and a beyond, faster moving and more audacious than the here and now.

Since when? Until when? How? Why?

Thinking about the book (that paper being), speaking of the book (that being of language), writing about the book (that being of trade) turns out to mean not giving up on accepting a responsibility greater than inattention or indifference.