The last book I bought from Shaman Drum—our local academic bookstore—was called The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. It was not the last, I hasten to add, because I had anything particularly against reading (or any other solitary vice that comes to mind): rather, after nearly thirty years in business, Shaman Drum had closed—along with a number of wonderful bookstores I frequented during my Wanderjahre (c. ages 13–54). These fell prey to many forces: the recession, rising rents, and here in Ann Arbor a university-backed attempt to direct textbook orders to a combine rather than our textbook-supported independent bookstore. But they’re also victims of broad changes in the means by which books are produced and consumed, all facilitated—if not necessitated—by the Internet. In age of Amazon and Kindle, the bookstore itself seems an anachronism; in the era of Twitter and IMing, so does the very notion of reading—or at least reading conceived of as a dense, hermeneutically rich, profoundly solitary activity.

This tale is usually told as one of loss—the death of the book, the end of reading. And there are genuine losses to be mourned here, not only of bookstores as a community resource—and a source of jobs for unemployed English majors—but of the actual person-to-person communications that go on there. (One of the chief virtues of bookstores, as of libraries, Michigan University Librarian Paul Courant reminds us in his contribution below, is that they are real-time social networking sites, places that facilitate human-to-human encounters between like-minded readers. Indeed, I realize, Barthes­ian enough, how much my romantic life has been intertwined with bookstores, whether the long-gone Great Expectations in Evanston, Illinois, in which I used to browse with my college girlfriend, or Tattered Cover in Denver, where I cooled my heels while waiting for someone living in the mountains fifty miles away, or Williams Corner Bookstore in Charlottesville, whose spectacular philosophy section occupied me while my wife, Sara, was preparing class. And whatever else one can say about them, Twitter-speak and IM-talk can’t be seen as major advances in a country where sloganeering routinely trumps thoughtful discourse, at least in my humble opinion.

That being said, it’s also the case that never before in history have so many words been produced and consumed by so many people, all texting and tweeting and e-mailing each other, often while doing other things. Indeed, if, as Michael Wood argues in these pages (following Benjamin), reading often takes place in a condition of distraction, so increasingly does writing—disconcertingly so: recent studies show that driving while texting is more hazardous even than driving while drunk. The same mixed blessing of abundance and threat is true of what’s happening with books. Whatever the merits of the recent concord between Google and libraries (as I write, Geoffrey Nunberg has published an account of the errors built into Google Books’ categorizing, making searches both hazardous and funny—“H. L. Mencken’s The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles”)—no serious reader or self-respecting scholar can ignore the potential this concord offers: the contents of the world’s libraries available on one’s desktop, a mouse click away! So too with Amazon’s Kindle device: although I don’t own one, I have serious Kindle-envy of my friends who do, all of whom flaunt their ability to access more or less any book they want, any time of day or night, delivered in a format that, while not yet the equal of the printed page, gives promise of one day becoming so. Yet more is being affected than just (just!) bookstores. Newspapers and magazines are disappearing at an alarming rate, with, among other effects, dismaying consequences for effective oversight of government and industry alike; publishers, too, are under pressure, with dismaying consequences for novelists and poets as well as editors and typesetters.

We thus live at a double moment: the death of the book and the dearth of reading face off against a proliferation of virtual books, the overabundance of writing. At such a time, everything seems up for grabs in ways both threatening and promising; it’s either a brave new world or Brave New World that confronts us. There’s nothing new about this juncture: it’s repeated from Plato’s moment through Gutenberg’s through Wordsworth’s through Matthew Arnold’s, and its appearance at our own time demonstrates many of the same familiar fears—fears about new technology, fears about the extension of the franchise to the mass reading public, ultimately fears for the human subject we have persistently imagined in and through the book. But it’s also a moment when new imaginations of literariness, new possibilities of audience, even new notions of the subject are beginning to emerge. Without abandoning our sense of what is lost, we mustn’t lose the imagination of what is potentially—and increasingly, actually—to be gained, albeit under conditions of inevitability.

As Alan Liu puts it so memorably, even though we might be witnessing the death of the death of the book (yet again! Jessica Pressman would add), we might also be present at the birth of the bookish, the reassertion and reimagination of the constellation of values and meanings traditionally associated with “the book”—a subset, Leah Price remind us, of all the many things that books are, have been, or can be, including, Zeynep Gürsel suggests, mouse food. By which we can also mean the ways in which, as we wheel into the untold future, we carry with us structures of feeling and thought that have been traditionally associated with the book—what Liu helpfully glosses as “the idea, psychology, sociology, value, and culture (if not also cult and religion) of the book”—even when we acknowledge the book to be a hypothetical identity at best, in the past, present, and future.

Or such was my thought as I gathered the essays, poems, and stories to be found in this volume. Many of the essays—the first five—are drawn from a symposium organized by this journal at the University of Michigan this past May; the products, largely, of scholars and academics, they canvass both the theoretical and the practical implications of the imaginary of bookishness and suggest some of the ways in which institutions like the university press and the library might adjust. Following them are two pieces that demonstrate the double affect of the current moment: poet David Kirby and anthropologist Zeynep Gürsel variously demonstrating both their mixed allegiance to the culture of bookishness, and their recognition of its transitoriness as it faces change either technological or material in nature. The rest of the issue offers a celebration of bookishness with an enlarged sense of what that might mean under the various pressures—the joyous complexity of reading distractedly, via Michael Wood; the mourning of a novelist by his son, an elegy that turns into a celebration of language in a world of objects and loss, as offered by Benjamin Busch; a discussion of the art of biography, with its complex allegiance to both the necessity and impossibility of the act of reconstructing a self, via Ilan Stavans and Donald Yates; from Andrew Haworth a story that takes as its central device the ultimate form of bookishness—the making of Torah scrolls—and weaves a mantle of sacredness and profaneness around it; poems that not only instantiate but also illustrate a bookish worldview, including Dana Roeser’s reimagining of Othello and Ray McDaniel’s of comic-book superheroes; and Stephen Burt’s extensive and surprising meditation on the abundant use of such figures in contemporary poetry. Taken together, as an assortment of looks forward, backwards, and sideways, the works in this volume offer takes both skeptical and affirmative on the nature and possibilities incarnated in the book and the kinds of new readings and new reading technologies that are emerging at the current moment that challenge, supplement, critique, and transcend them. Or—to quote Karl Pohrt, former proprietor of Shaman Drum and now an enterprising blogger—if the book is dead, long live the bookish!