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10 reasons NOT to love books (compliments of H.L. Mencken)

When the American Booksellers Association asked gadfly journalist H.L. Mencken to address its members in 1940, Mencken lived up to his joyfully contrarian reputation, treating his listeners to a survey of critics over several centuries who doubted that books were worth the trouble.

Mencken was good at this sort of thing. In addition to being a prolific writer, he was also a voracious reader, collecting enough quotations along the way to fill his massive “A New Dictionary of Quotations,” first published in 1942.

Mencken’s speech to the ABA has just been reprinted in the latest issue of Menckeniana, the official journal of the H.L. Mencken Society. Although the journal is available online only to Mencken Society members, here’s a sampling of 10 quotations that Mencken used to remind his audience that not everyone is a book lover.

1. Martin Luther

  • By Danny Heitman Contributor

“The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing. Everyone must be an author – some out of vanity, to acquire fame and raise up a name; others for the sake of mere lucre.”

– Martin Luther, 15th-century leader of the Protestant reformation

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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