SOURCE: "Pulling the Plug," in New Statesman, Vol. 125, No. 4300, September 13, 1996, pp. 46-7.

In the following review, Jardine faults the integrity of Birkerts's polemic in The Gutenberg Elegies, dismissing his prediction of cultural doom from technological advances.

Sven Birkerts composes his literary essays on an old IBM Selectrix typewriter. He is proud to admit that he understands little about new technology. But he is absolutely sure that the advent of the personal computer marks the end of reading, and that the headlong expansion of the Internet sounds the death knell for the book as we know it.

Enthusiastic reviews of the U.S. edition of The Gutenberg Elegies eloquently testify that plenty of cultivated people will welcome Birkerts's lament, full of foreboding, because it resonates deeply with their own sense of the end of culture. The Bloomsbury Review is quoted: "In my more melancholy mood I hear deeper in...