Bibliophile of the Future: His Complaints About the Twentieth Century

by Jacques Barzun

19 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1976

About the author

Works of French-American educator, author, and historian Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (see Charles Robert Darwin, Karl Marx, and Richard Wagner) (1941) and The American University (1968).

He presented ideas and culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques...

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

"They and the books called scholarly are taken as signs of a knowledge explosion. It is only a knowledge inflation. The knowledge which should go into a footnote of six lines is made into an article of twelve pages; and that which should go into an article of twelve pages goes into a book of three hundred."

It is sad to see that nothing has changed in the past 40 years.
How long will these e-books of our time last? Paperbacks have become better, sure, but to last for hundreds of years? What about the works with naught but one edition and only a few thousand copies printed; that essay/article written in that one magazine from the 30s, the paper completely decayed or vanished—a master-piece of another time that nobody now living has read nor will ever read. Woe to thousands of 20th century works which have been out-of-print for half a century, lost and forgotten collecting dust in attics.
Ironically, most of Barzun's own books are no longer being published either; I had to order 'Of Human Freedom' from the other side of the pond, unless I wished to pay hundreds of pounds (cheapest at Amazon.UK is £155 at the moment of writing, got it for 30$ from US, including shipping/taxes).