Ammon Shea read all of the Oxford English Dictionary for his book “Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages” (2008). Jacobs, a self-described “human guinea pig,” spent a year reading the encyclopedia for “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World” (2004). She is not the first writer to set off on an armchair expedition. “So I would read my way into the unknown-into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no best-seller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not even word of mouth to guide me.” She compares her voyage to Ernest Shackleton’s explorations in the Antarctic._ “However, I like to sleep under a quilt with my head on a goose down pillow,” she writes. “I thought of my adventure as Off-Road or Extreme Reading,” Phyllis Rose writes in “The Shelf: From LEQ to LES,” the latest stunt book, in which she reads through a more or less random shelf of library books. In this climate of embattled bibliophilia, a new subgenre of books about books has emerged, a mix of literary criticism, autobiography, self-help, and immersion journalism: authors undertake reading stunts to prove that reading-anything-still matters. The merchandising of reading has a curiously undifferentiated flavor, as if what you read mattered less than that you read. A spread in The Paris Review featured literature-inspired paint-chip colors (a charcoal Funeral Suit for “The Loser_”_ a mossy “Graham Greene”). Alongside the tote bags you can find T-shirts, magnets, and buttons emblazoned with covers of classic novels the Web site Etsy sells tights printed with poems by Emily Dickinson. The number of Americans who read books has been declining for thirty years, and those who do read have become proud of, even a bit overidentified with, the enterprise. This tale of two bags is the story of decades of change in the publishing industry. In a simple red heart, the word “books” was spelled out in white letters. Recently, I was poking around a bookstore in Manhattan and noticed a canvas tote for sale. In the nineteen-nineties, when you bought a book at Barnes & Noble the cashier slipped it into a plastic bag bearing a black-and-white illustration of an author’s face-Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton.
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