moratorium bibliotecha

 It is time for writers and publishers to pause in their ceaseless efforts to produce more and more books.

The Large Library Machine has reached 14M texts, each of which contains up to 100,000 words, all usually carefully structured in such a way as to convey many truths, much wisdom, but also so many ideas that are just plain wrong. But how is the poor reader supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff? Even the index would take a lifetime to read, and that too has gaps and repetitions.

There are so many of these books that the business of organising them has taken over from tasks like farming, tailoring, doctoring, house building and other essential tasks, such that the population is going unfed, in rags, and constantly sniffling, from the constant breezes blowing through the gaps in the walls.

But no-one can find the right instructions for when to sew, when to plant, when to harvest, what could be used to treat the common cold, or re-plaster the walls.

No, we must call a temporary end to the constant creation of more and more written material, until we have had time to have a fair and open debate on how to accommodate this scourge without the damage to the social fabric that it has caused.

We need metrics. For example, we have no idea how to tell if a particular book will fit in a particular person's head. Nor do we know what size of library would overwhelm any person in the three score years and ten of their natural lifetime, or what would be a delicate sufficiency (assuming occasional re-reading of timeless classics) for most of us. Time to temporarily suspend the generation of new tomes. No more novels for, shall we say, six months. After all, we know that there are only 9 plots and 3 kinds of hero, with a handful of possible counterfactual realities, and merely 4 theme tunes in the televised adaptation.

Indeed, we could probably use the time to thin the libraries down to those works that have proved their worth. The rest could be used to stuff the gaps n the walls, or to weave winter warming underwear, or even to blow one's nose.