But I have swam through libaries.
When the gigantic problems of selection and planning raised by the process of putting untold millions of books, periodicals, and newspapers on microfilm and microfiche have been resolved, will this transformation be accompanied by a gradual corresponding change in the minds and hearts of human beings? The day will no doubt come when new books will have adapted to these modes of communication and transmission, the sound track - the recovery of the spoken word, or revenge on the written word - and the videocassette making a new shift. In the meantime, a transitional kind of reading may have become established - it, too, founded on shock, even in the home. In relation to it the old kind of reading will survive only as a refined luxury, a sort of eroticism in the era of test-tube babies - a form of reading very different from the multifaceted one that [Walter] Benjamin, to say nothing of Mallarmé, knew and practiced.
