But it’s not just under dictatorships or in areas of the globe ravaged by war that books and reading are stigmatized. In 1953, during the McCarthy-ite witch-hunts that sought to root out all real or imagined Communist subversives within the United States, the American Library Association was moved to issue its seminal document, ‘The Freedom To Read’ in response to what they considered was the threat to freedom of expression posed by the Cold War. Here’s an inspiring digest of it:

The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label “controversial” views, to distribute lists of “objectionable” books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as citizens devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.

Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary citizen, by exercising critical judgment, will accept the good and reject the bad. The censors, public and private, assume that they should determine what is good and what is bad for their fellow citizens.

We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. Such pressure toward conformity is perhaps natural to a time of accelerated change. And yet suppression is never more dangerous than in such a time of social tension. Freedom has given the United States the elasticity to endure strain. Freedom keeps open the path of novel and creative solutions, and enables change to come by choice. Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of our society and leaves it the less able to deal with controversy and difference.

Now as always in our history, reading is among our greatest freedoms. The freedom to read and write is almost the only means for making generally available ideas or manners of expression that can initially command only a small audience. The written word is the natural medium for the new idea and the untried voice from which come the original contributions to social growth. It is essential to the extended discussion that serious thought requires, and to the accumulation of knowledge and ideas into organized collections.

To which one can only add, “Spot on”. But the depressing thing is, the ALA are still having to revise and update the document 50 years after it was first issued. (1)  So even those of us living in (nominal) democracies need to be constantly on our guard.

As the hawks on the American Right tend to say, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. Just read the introduction to the UK edition of Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men’, and you’ll see how insidious forms of censorship are very much with us in the 21st century - and how in this particular case, the suppression of Moore’s book was foiled by a group of militant librarians who took on the combined strength of Rupert Murdoch and the US Government. I know Moore over-eggs his puddings a lot, but even if half of what he claims here is true, it still makes for disturbing reading.

So the struggles that writers, publishers and librarians have faced down the centuries and are still facing, all contribute to the special place books continue to hold in our own democratic culture as repositories for man’s creative and intellectual endeavours. It’s the bedrock of what books mean, and that history’s thrown in with the cover price of every book we buy. So books communicate meaning before you even open them. They’ve had a long journey to get here, of which the above is a necessarily small sample of the trials they’ve undergone. (2)

Amid all this special pleading, however, we mustn’t lose sight of literature’s entertainment value. Books are increasingly being marketed using ideas of escape, or as aids to relaxation, and that’s really what our Recreational Reader’s after this particular Saturday morning, which is why he’s not in the T-shirt shop. He’s had a shitty week, and he needs some form of diversion that’s maybe a little more rewarding than vegging out in front of Sky Sports. And he’s not alone: over 54% of readers in the UK reckon their primary motivation for reading is to help them calm down. And the king (or perhaps Queen) of these recreational genres is the Romance.

Most women, it seems, use romantically-inclined literature to unwind - they must, or 49% of paperbacks sold in America wouldn’t be romances (and that’s according to the ‘New York Times’, so that’s a fact, Jack). And romance readers are yet another of those huge underground constituencies of readers that criticism pays little or no attention to, so they don’t show up on the cultural radar that often - except to be patronized, of course.

This is, of course, nothing new. The first romance is generally agreed to have appeared in the fourth century A.D -  Aethiopica by Heliodorus. In a plot strangely familiar to today's romance readers and followers of soap operas, the heroine Chariclea falls in love with Theagenes shortly after taking her vows of chastity as a priestess of Diana. They run away together to search for her parents who turn out to be the King and Queen of Ethiopia. Along the way, pirates, robbers and an evil queen create a series of obstacles which Chariclea must overcome before she can confront her father with his abandonment of her at birth, and gain his blessing on her union with Theagenes (who is required to slay a maddened bull to prove his worthiness as a suitor). Eat your heart out, Jackie Collins. And we can trace a line of romances through Arthurian literature through to the 18th century, when the Minerva Press in England was cranking them out like Mills & Boon do now. Nobody remembers the large number of novels by Eliza Parsons, Regina Maria Roche, Elizabeth Helme, the Lee Sisters, Charlotte Smith, Charlotte Dacre and Mary Charlton, but suffice to say, they gave a lot of readers a lot of fun. So Georgette Heyer, Catherine Cookson and Jilly Cooper didn’t just appear out of nowhere - they’re part of a noble tradition of entertainment stretching back over 1600 years.

One of the most interesting facets of the Romance’s history is the composition of its audience. The Arthurian chronicles were enjoyed by both sexes, and there was absolutely no stigma attached to being seen in public with a copy of Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’ about your person. The theory goes that the male reader liked the tales of derring-do, and were comfortable with love that was intellectual and aspirational, (which most of it was in 15th century literature). (3) The knights fought the battles and won the ladies - no marriage, babies, settling down or in fact any sissy stuff whatsoever. But then the emphasis changed.

As more women learned to read during the Renaissance, they demanded (and writers gradually gave them) less fighting and more of a domestic focus, which was the cue for men to desert the genre.

And that’s the way it’s been ever since; on holiday, Mum takes her romance, and Dad picks up a thriller. I don’t know how you prove any of the above two paragraphs, but it sounds as good a theory as any I’ve come across.

And of course, your critic routinely sneers at both Mum and Dad for their ‘low’ tastes in reading matter. But then you look at the statistics for Mills & Boon and wonder how you can so readily dismiss a genre which can boast these figures:

Þ      Mills and Boon sell over 200 million books world-wide each year. That's more than six books every second.

Þ      their titles are sold in over 100 countries and are translated into 26 languages.

Þ      over 800 new titles are published each month (no, that’s not a misprint).

Now that’s a lot of relaxation - and only one publisher’s figures. So are all these people stupid, Mr Critic?

So let’s quickly look where we’ve got to: we all have ambitions for our reading, whether it’s self-improvement, or simple entertainment. These are the two main reasons most of us reach for a book. But what to choose? What’s going to make one book stand out from all the rest in the shop? What’s going to make this book leap out at our Recreational Reader and shout “Buy me!”

It’s actually three things - Money, Love and Longevity, a trio of unlikely bedfellows that confer meaning on any book before a word’s been read. Together (and as you’ll see, they aren’t always easy to separate out), they constitute what I’m going to call the circumstantial meaning of a book, which, it seems to me, is rarely taken into account in lit crit because it doesn’t address the text,  but is every bit as important as what’s between the covers in that it gets prospective readers to acknowledge the existence of the book in the first instance.

“I can’t imagine anything more encouraging than having someone buy your work. I never write - indeed, am physically incapable of writing - anything that I don’t think will be paid for.”

(Truman Capote, writer)

"There can hardly be stranger wares in the world than books: printed by people who do not understand them; sold by people who do not understand them; bound, reviewed, and read by people who do not understand them; and now even written by people who do not understand them."

(Georg Christof Lictenberg, 1790’s German physicist)

Of the three bedfellows mentioned above, the inclusion of Money is likely to be the most perplexing to those raised on the notion that a book is the precious life blood of a master spirit (or ‘PLBOAMS’ as we’ll abbreviate it from now on). But it’s money that will give any book its initial leg-up on the ladder of immortality by getting it published in the first place. Simply for a book to exist, to be a physical thing you can touch endows it with meaning. Meaning is nothing without an audience, and without being published in one form or another, a book won’t get to much of an audience. And if we want to go down a short existential side alley (and why not, it reminds me of being a student again), we could apply the tree falling in the forest analogy to it; if nobody witnessed the tree fall, did it actually fall? If Kafka or Vergil’s executors had obeyed their friends’ final wishes and destroyed the manuscripts of ‘Metamorphosis’ and ‘The Aeneid’, we could only mourn their loss, like the contents of the Library at Alexandria. So any potential audience would have been robbed of the chance of discovering their worth, and placing them on the cultural pedestals they occupy today. And while it would be nice to think that there’s some kind of Platonic Realm of Meaning that contains all the lost material ever written, it unfortunately doesn’t exist outside the world of philosophical speculation. Meaning has to survive in an oral or physical form, and not in some vague spiritual miasma to mean anything. Hence the connection between publishing, money and meaning.

Obvious, I know, but sometimes people from both inside and outside publishing can get a tad precious about literature and rail at the cash nexus inherent in any commercial venture associated with it. They’re made uneasy by the juxtaposition of Mammon and the PLBOAMS, while ignoring the simple fact that the production of the book they’re reading represents a considerable financial investment by someone. But the more business-oriented that someone appears to be, the greater suspicion they seem to arouse  in certain quarters.

It’s all part of the mindset we’ve just looked at - books are ‘special’ and somehow above all that. Or the worthwhile ones are, anyway.

 Take the late James Laughlin, founder and for many years principal editor of the avant-garde publisher New Directions, who, when asked if it was possible to make money in publishing, replied; "It can be done, if you have enough bad taste to do it." The essayist and critic Joseph Epstein also noted this attitude in a 2001 article in ‘Commentary ‘ magazine, entitled ‘Among the Gentlemen Publishers’, in which he examines the consolidation of small family-run publishing companies into giant anonymous conglomerates:

Where once it was understood that commercially popular books would "carry" more intellectually sophisticated and literary books, and publishers could await the slow accumulation of revenues from titles retained in the "backlist," publishing is currently now [sic] said to be a serve-and-volley game, and if a book fails to get to the net quickly, it will not be allowed to make it at all. Good - possibly great - books are being degraded in importance, if not entirely ignored, or so it is argued.

So, in a nutshell; a) only vulgar stuff sells, and b) the huge media multinationals who’ve recently been swallowing those traditional publishers who knew and cared about literature don’t realize that acquiring the taste for a book may take a while - by which time, the company will either have lost patience and deleted it from the back catalogue; or, if they do realize this in advance, it may never get published because it won’t deliver a return on their investment quickly enough. (4) Not only that, but “intellectually sophisticated” books are being made to punch their weight in the marketplace. Imagine! How dare they!

There are those that have argued that commissioning literature using these standards is tantamount to an insidious form of censorship that is prejudicial to the kind of literature that doesn’t fit a proscribed format, or can’t be targeted at a recognized demographic. In other words, those books at the ‘artier’ end of the spectrum. Or, as some would see it, the cutting edge of literature.

So, the concern is that the more money enters the equation, the lower the standards of published literature will fall, and the less literature will ‘mean’, since, in the opinion of many commentators, Meaning is synonymous with a book’s Perceived Quality (this is Big Theme #9, by the way). And Literature (with a big ‘L’), in order to be Literature, must be good. True? Let’s spend the rest of this section exploring this Big Theme. And what “good” actually means.

Footnotes:

1. Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 currently threatens bookshop and library privacy following the catastrophic events of 9/11.  FBI agents do not need to prove they have “probable cause” before searching bookshop or library records: they can get access to the records of anyone whom they believe to have information that may be relevant to a terrorism investigation, including people who are not suspected of committing a crime or of having any knowledge of a crime. The request for an order authorizing the search is heard by a secret court in a closed proceeding, making it impossible for a bookseller or librarian to have the opportunity to object on First Amendment grounds prior to the execution of the order.

2. And just look at this list: these are all the books that have either been “banned, expurgated or challenged” in the last 50 years in America (I can find no equivalent list in the UK, although we’re as guilty as many. Maybe we just keep quiet about it): Dorothy Allison - Bastard Out of Carolina, American Heritage Dictionary, The Anarchist Cookbook, Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Anonymous - Go Ask Alice, James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk, Frank L. Baum - The Wizard of Oz, Judy Blume - Deenie; Forever; Tiger Eyes;Blubber;Wifey, Boston Women's Health Book Collective - Our Bodies, Ourselves, Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451, Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan, William Burroughs - Naked Lunch, Robert Cormier - The Chocolate War, Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Witches, Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species, Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man, William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying; Mosquitos, F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby, Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary, E.M. Forster - Maurice, Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nancy Garden - Annie on My Mind, Allen Ginsberg - Howl and Other Poems, Nikki Giovanni - My House, William Golding - Lord of the Flies, Bette Green - The Drowning of Stephan Jones, Judith Guest - Ordinary People, Alex Haley and Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Joseph Heller - Catch-22, Langston Hughes, ed. - Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, Aldous Huxley - Brave New World, James Joyce - Ulysses, Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth, Stephen King - Cujo;The Shining, John Knowles - A Separate Peace, D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover, Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird, Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer, Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye; Song of Solomon, Leslea Newman - Heather Has Two Mommies, Eugene O'Neill - Desire Under the Elms; Strange Interlude, George Orwell - 1984, Katherine Paterson - Bridge to Terabithia, Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar, Pauline Reage - The Story of O, Luis Rodriguez - Always Running, Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses, J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye, Hubert Selby Jr. - Last Exit to Brooklyn, Maurice Sendak - In the Night Kitchen, William Shakespeare - The Merchant of Venice; Romeo and Juliet, Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres, John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath; Of Mice and Men; The Red Pony, Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five, Alice Walker - The Color Purple; In Love and Trouble, Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass, Michael Willhoite - Daddy's Roommate, Edmund Wilson - Memoirs of Hecate County, Richard Wright - Native Son; Black Boy.

Some you can just about understand - but ‘The Great Gatsby’?

3. The classic text on the subject of medieval and Renaissance literary love is ‘The Allegory of Love’, by CS Lewis - well worth seeking out