Hello, welcome to the Editor's Desk. This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things Magazine. I'm Rusty Reno on the editor of First Things Magazine, and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.

I'm delighted to have with us today, Vessi de Toyi to talk about his article in the June

July 2025 issue, The Future of Reading. Welcome to the podcast, Vessi. Thank you. It's pleasure to be here.

You're looking at the evolution, and I suppose, the devolution of reading across the modern era.

And so you start out, your piece evoking for us, kind of the late 19th, early 20th century scene.

What is that it's a world awash with the printed word, isn't it?

Yes.

It's, it is the beginning or, yes, it's the beginning of an enormous boom in reading.

Literacy levels are rising steeply and there are all sorts of benefits to reading in this world, social, vocational, religious, and so on.

And so it's a world in which more people than ever are reading, more people than ever want to read,

and that pattern which emerges at that time

is unprecedented. I think a young person today probably has a difficult time fathoming the

importance of the daily newspaper. Forget the daily newspaper, the morning newspaper,

followed by the noon edition, followed by the 3 p.m.

edition, followed by the 7 p.m. edition. I mean, I think, isn't that right? Around 1900, you know,

the newspapers. Yes, I love those, I love those paintings from that period where you see rooms full of people and every single one of them is buried behind a board sheet in the same way as the day they would be staring at the screen.

And book clubs also were a big thing.

I mean, the working man's didn't the labor movement and socialist parties had book clubs and so forth to educate the working man as to his, the proper, I don't know, where the arch of history was going?

That's right. So Jonathan Rose wrote a fascinating book about what he called the intellectual culture of the working

class in Britain.

And from a contemporary viewpoint, it's absolutely astonishing.

It comes back to just how much people wanted to read

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