Reading for Pleasure Wednesday, Bastille Day Edition: John Locke

Posted on by Iansã

“Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them…with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society, and that general fairness that cements mankind.”

Open thread on both the quotation and the article from whence it comes!

Axé.

3 thoughts on “Reading for Pleasure Wednesday, Bastille Day Edition: John Locke”

  2. I don’t know. Lynn Hunt thinks that the development of mass market novels (the very early ones) made the concept of human rights possible. So that’s one thing.

    I don’t get the Locke quotation at all.

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  3. I think he’s actually talking about capitalism and being ironic. I am not sure he would say it was capitalism, though.

    The article interests me because 0f the discussion of book culture and the point that books offer more than “content” — and because of the ongoing question of the future of print media, the meaning of that, and so on.

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