None of this was new. Reading has always been used as a way to divide a country and a culture into the literati and everyone else, the intellectually worthy and the hoi polloi. But in the fifteenth century Gutenberg invented the printing press, and so began the process of turning the book from a work of art for the few into a source of information for the many. After that, it became more difficult for one small group of people to lay an exclusive claim to books, to seize and hold reading as their own. But it continued to be done by critics and scholars. When I began to read their work, I was disheartened to discover that many of them felt that the quality of poetry and prose, novels and history and biography, was plummeting into some intellectual bargain basement. But reading saved me from despair, as it always had, for the more I read the more I realized it had always been thus, and that apparently an essential part of studying literature, whether in 1840, 1930, or 1975, was to conclude that there had once been a golden age, that it was gone. "The movies consumed so large a part of the leisure of the country that little time is left for other things," the trade magazine of the industry, Publisher Weekly, lamented in 1923. "The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor," the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine said in 1960.