Book Hauntings

On the fate and faith of reading, and other matters of life and death.

In memory of Herman Graf, 1933-2025.

---

1 :: “Books Never Die”

“I have been a reader and buyer and borrower and collector of books all my life,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote in a statement sent to be read at the annual banquet of the American Booksellers Association in 1942. FDR continued:

It is more important that your work should go on now than it has ever been at any other time in our history: in a very literal sense you carry upon your bookshelves the light that guides civilization. . . . We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die.

I came upon this quotation in the preface to a volume called Book Row, Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador’s anecdotal history of the bookselling culture and commerce that thrived on and around Manhattan’s Fourth Avenue for nearly a century, beginning in the 1890s. It was published in 2003 by my friend Herman Graf, who passed away this past February.

An obituary in the New York Times did not appear until two weeks after Herman’s death—he would have been insufferably impatient had he been alive to comment on the delay—but the obit writer, Richard Sandomir, put the intervening time to good use, finding the right chord at the start:

Herman Graf, a major and intrepid figure in independent publishing who sold copies of Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer to bookstores after it was embroiled in a legal fight over whether it was obscene, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Flushing, Queens. He was 91.

Herman was made for such embroilments. He would have relished the fighting as well as the obscenity, and pursued exultant judgement like someone imagined by Victor Hugo whose victories were measured in copies sold, but nonetheless triumphant for that.

In his celebratory profile, Sandomir deftly captures Herman’s achievements as salesman and then publisher: he was instrumental in the success of Grove Press through the 1960s and 1970s; he published the Senate Watergate Report as a two-volume paperback in July 1974, a month before Richard Nixon’s resignation; he almost singlehandedly—as Herman told it, and it’s close enough to treat as true in eulogistic recall—catapulted John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces from undeserved obscurity to unimagined bestseller-hood (with a Pulitzer Prize to boot). And he did it with panache; as Sandomir relates, Barney Rosset, the founder of Grove who hired and fired Herman three times, announced one dismissal with the words: “I want to be clear, this isn’t about your performance. It’s personal.”

All of that was before I knew Herman, who began pestering me when he noticed the fledgling success of the bookselling catalogue, A Common Reader, that I launched in 1986. I say “pestering” with affection, for I welcomed his constant suggestion of titles he was bringing back into print at Carroll & Graf, the firm he’d started with Kent Carroll in 1982. Plus, he returned my calls, which few people from the more established publishing houses deigned to do in the early years of our enterprise. He was a true mentor, guiding me through the traffic in books in which I found myself navigating professional life.

Born in Germany in 1933, he came to America four years later when his family fled the Nazis. His Bronx childhood, as he related it through countless dinners over many years, was filled with boxing and basketball as well as books. He’d read all of Balzac and all of Proust, but his lettered attention didn’t stop him from more worldly accomplishments, like getting banned for life from a restaurant for insulting its stuffed derma. We bonded underneath our banter through our Bronx roots and our shared instincts as inveterate book hounds. Nothing excited him more than getting me to commit to 500 copies of some lost treasure he had his heart set on reviving, unless it was the promise of taking 1,000 copies of a book I’d discovered and desperately wanted to offer our customers. One example of the latter was Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 account of his adventures as a member of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1910-12 Antarctic expedition, The Worst Journey in the World, a pinnacle of the genre of Arctic and Antarctic exploration that had been out of print in America for some time. The critic A. Alvarez once said Cherry-Garrard’s book is to travel writing what War and Peace is to the novel, and the opening sentence of its preface exhibits the sardonic sensibility that makes it a delight to read: “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.” I remember reading that to Herman over the phone as I made my pitch.

In 1996, he called to float another idea. Was I familiar with Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe? I was: this enormous roman-fleuve, written between the years 1904 and 1912, was the primary reason its author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915. More saliently, it was a keystone of my book-besotted adolescence, for at some time in my teens I had picked up a battered old edition of the novel at a library sale and spent months afloat on Rolland’s river, transported by its cradle-to-grave story of a musical prodigy who escapes his provincial home in the German Rhineland and travels to pre-World War I Paris, where, through a torrent of friends and lovers, and the whirlpools of musical, social, and political society, he rises to fame while never relenting in his search for spiritual fulfillment in his art.

---

---

Rolland’s story was filled with such a pageantry of passionate action that my untempered soul was swept up as in a parade, marching through dimensions of experience I had never imagined and would, in fact, never approach. Extremes of ambition and violence, of artistic vision and amorous attention, of political upheaval and personal commitment were delivered in abundance, each extreme peopled with character and psychology by an artist bent on lifting the whole world on the tide of his prose. It was like being pulled bodily into one of Beethoven’s symphonies, and finding all the notes had faces, each chord an anecdote, each theme a plot, each movement a stage of life, each melody an emotion lived and learned from. (The metaphor is apt, for Beethoven’s life is in many ways the model for that of Rolland’s protagonist; Rolland also wrote a biography of the composer.)

In short, mere mention of the title brought back a stream of memories that met a rush of Herman’s own as he related his discovery of the novel in a public library and his rapid traversal of its thousand-page landscape a couple of decades before me, most likely in the same single-volume Modern Library edition I knew, and which Herman was now planning to reprint—if, that is, I’d take a thousand copies to hedge his bet. I did—and I had them for a long time, with no regrets, except to bemoan how much warehouse space they occupied.

---

At the time of our Jean-Christophe adventure, a series of little books published by Penguin to celebrate that publisher's sixtieth anniversary was the talk of England’s book trade. The slim, small “Penguin 60s,” each consisting of an excerpt from a full-length book (a selection from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, for example, or a lyrical essay by Albert Camus), so tenaciously took hold of the bestseller lists that they were relegated to a new chart of their own. While some commentators celebrated the phenomenon as a sign that the classics were alive and well—so many people carrying Camus around in their pockets to leaven the labor of their bus rides—other pundits were bemoaning the tiny tomes as yet another indication that the wisdom of the ages was being repackaged as a consumerist token of culture. Marcus Aurelius and Montaigne, Camus and Virginia Woolf would soon exist only as easily digested excerpts, and the real work of reading would go undone, the big books remain forever unopened. This was close to a decade before the smartphone arrived occupy the better, or at least the larger, part of our collective attention, and musings on the diminishment of literary mindfulness became more pervasive, even, to readers like me, existential, validating the prescience of thinkers like George Steiner and Ivan Illich, who’d ruminated, long before the ubiquity of apps, upon what the former called “the end of bookishness.” In his 1993 volume, In the Vineyard of the Text, Illich wrote: “The book has now ceased to be the root-metaphor of the age; the screen has taken its place.”

Fast forward to this past weekend, when, after an hour enjoying the antics of antiquarian booksellers in Book Row, I turned to an essay by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker online called “What’s Happening to Reading?”

Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic.

Rothman references data from the National Center for Education Statistics showing that, over the past decade or so, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” has fallen from twenty-seven percent to fourteen percent. “Predictably,” he adds, “college professors have been complaining with more than usual urgency about phone-addled students who struggle to read anything of substantial length or complexity.” He cites a study of the reading comprehension skills of English majors at two midwestern universities in which the participants were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House out loud and then translate each sentence into “plain English.” Going to the study itself, I find among its major findings that only five per cent (four out of eighty-five subjects) “had a detailed literal, understanding” of the passages in question, and that “problematic readers”—more than half of the sample—“often described their reading process as skimming/and or relying on SparkNotes.”

Rothman aptly calls the kind of evidence provided by such studies “thin,” but calls his own judgement into question by saying the Bleak House test “is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.” That’s funny, and not so much wrong as misguided in its unexpressed but underlying presumption that clarity to an unwilling or ill-prepared audience should be a standard of measure or value for anything at all. Sometimes, fog everywhere offers its own exuberant rewards, as Dickens illustrates in the second of those seven paragraphs:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Later, listing some of the benefits an AI like Anthropic’s Claude might provide for readers, Rothman writes:

AI can also simplify: if you’re struggling with the opening of Bleak House, you can ask for it to be rewritten using easier, more modern English. “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”

Gone from the direct path by definition are the entwined rhythms of Dickens’s invocation of his themes; it’s like rendering the Art of the Fugue without counterpoint.

Such complaints aside, Rothman’s reflections on AI’s potential to rewrite as well as rewire the world are smart and timely:

What will happen to reading culture as reading becomes automated? Suppose we’re headed toward a future in which text is seen as fluid, fungible, refractable, abstractable. In this future, people will often read by asking for a text to be made shorter and more to-the-point, or to be changed into something different, like a podcast or multi-text report.

If such speculations were disheartening to someone who cut his teeth (and later lost his bet) on Jean-Christophe, my heart was lifted the very next morning when I came upon these words in David Russell’s tonic monograph on British psychoanalyst Marion Milner, whose probing sense of attention and experience, as enacted in her meta-diaries, I’ve been pondering for the past year:¹

Anyone who has come to be interested in the profound insights to be gained from reading literature, however, will notice pretty quickly that these insights are difficult to summarize. Although some people, for instance, have credited a book like Middlemarch with changing their lives, no one has had this reaction to a summary of its plot. This unruliness is precisely what relates reading literature to a project, like Milner’s, of reading one’s own life.

What books teach—not by the ends their contents might define but by the means engagement with their emergent expression creates—is how to most tellingly read our own becoming.

In the future that beckons, Rothman writes in his New Yorker piece,

Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas. A piece of writing, which today is often seen as an end point, a culmination, a finished unit of effort, may, for better and worse, be experienced as a stepping stone to something else.

But that, as Marion Milner knew and expounded with uncommon insight, is what text could always be: the something else it leads to is an inner life, for which there is no culmination but the ultimate one. People die, but books do not, or so I will believe as long as I am able.

---

I think of Herman in his last years, in his apartment on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing, and wonder when he pulled a volume of his favorite author off the shelf for the last time. Next to his treasured set of Balzac’s collected works, I know, was the Repertory of the Comédie Humaine, prepared by Anatole Cerfberr and Jules François Christophe in the late nineteenth century, a dictionary of the characters Balzac created to people his capacious world, a listing in which Herman’s larger-than-life presence deserved a fictive spot.

And I think again of Jean-Christophe, recognizing that, while an untempered soul might be hungry for heroic life, an aging reader of its pages would know too well that he will never find a field for the unfolding of far-resonant action—except, of course, in the pages of a text, if he can summon the combination of concentration and abandon it demands. Immersion in such novels in one’s youth is hopelessly romantic, of course, as sentimental and unrealistic as it may be inspiring. But displacing that experience with faster and more frictionless modes of attention will surely lose something in translation, for efficiency seldom echoes with the resonance imagination needs to validate its impetuous uncertainty.

“If this life be not a real fight,” William James once wrote, “in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

That’s a fate that Herman, may he rest in peace, would certainly recognize, and a faith he would ardently espouse.

---

This is the first part of a planned three-part essay.

---

1. Marion Milner was born in 1900 and died in 1998. The meta-diaries I allude to are A Life of One’s Own (1934), An Experiment in Leisure (1937), and On Not Being Able to Paint (1950); each was originally published under the pseudonym Joanna Field. David Russell’s Marion Milner: On Creativity (2024) is a wise and inviting introduction to her thought and work.