SOURCE: "Endangered Books?," in Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1995, pp. 4-9.

In the following review, Solomon discusses the pros and cons of Birkerts's thesis in The Gutenberg Elegies.

Deeply imprinted in both our racial and individual psyches is the image of a lost golden age, paradisiacal in its virtue and brilliance. Nothing, it seems, can recall that Edenic hour of splendor in the grass or glory in the womb except lamentation that the good old days have yielded to coarser, brasher times.

So those of us who love the spell and sensuous delight of books come with predisposed sympathy to Sven Birkerts' mournful elegy for the printed page [The Gutenberg Elegies]. Writing on an antiquated typewriter a mere floppy disk's throw from MIT, the justly acclaimed literary critic has peered into the technological future of letters and found, to his horror, that it moves at the speed of light.

Speaking...