On Pages (The Past Lives of Letters in AI's Ghostly Now)

Bookseller, creator of the mail order book catalog A Common Reader, and author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, James Mustich considers what books mean in the age of AI.

This is a book about pages: the reading and writing that animates them, and what they in turn can bring to life. In a series of linked essays that are literary, historical, metaphorical, and anecdotal, James Mustich first considers how things get onto pages and what they do there, and how an indiscriminate use of generative AI threatens to change both. Ranging from prehistory through the rise of silent reading and the revolutionary ways of knowing it engendered, ultimately, through the words of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and a consideration of the fiction of Charles Dickens and Ali Smith leads to reflections on writing in, and through, time.

Mustich then looks to the traffic in books, the trade in words, the destiny of books and bookstores, the avocations of booksellers and browsers, seeking to recollect, in this erasive age, the private reading and writing that has shaped his own small literary life, and to articulate lessons drawn from the life of letters writ large, even while the characters that inscribed it for centuries seem in danger of being overwritten in a single generation by the relentless chattering of machine outputs. And yet: if the onrushing present seems in thrall to the ghost of meaning, the past lives of letters know how to remember its substance; they are a history of proven spells.