In its August issue, The Atlantic ran “The End of Reading Is Here,” by Rose Horowitch. It argued that Americans process more words than any generation before us — texts, posts, captions, threads — while the sustained attention that a book demands is slipping away. Horowitch’s word for this is postliterate rather than illiterate.
Fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind in 2022. The share who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. And roughly 20 percent of adults now account for more than 80 percent of all books read.
A Rutgers historian tells Horowitch that reading is becoming a niche hobby, on the order of stamp collecting.
Stamp collecting. One of my grandfathers did that. How many stamp collectors do you know today?
Horowitch frames the whole thing with the Library of Alexandria, which she argues didn’t burn so much as it was neglected — the will to maintain it ran out before the scrolls did. That threat of apathy got me thinking about this on my long drive back from PulpFest last week.
The BookTubers arrive
A lot of us grew up reading pulp stories reprinted in paperback books, from science fiction, horror, and fantasy to pulp heroes and westerns.
As I mentioned in my PulpFest 2026 report last week, attendance hit a record with 487.
Among the new faces at the convention were “BookTubers,” at least 11 that I know of.
Just as we read genre fiction in paperbacks, the BookTubers are doing the same. They were already reading in our territory and worked their way back to where it all started. They followed the trail to the pulps just as we did.
Richard Rempel (who posts on YouTube under Vintage SF) and Nick Anderson (The Book Graveyard) were kind enough to provide me with lists of other BookTubers who were at PulpFest 2026:
- Bad Taste Books (Bryan Raines)
- The Book Rapport (Brandon Purvis)
- Infinite Text (Andreea)
- Liminal Spaces (Chris)
- L-Space Archives (Rob)
- Pulp Mortem (Jake Swick)
- The Retired Book Guy (Lee)
- Secret Fire Books (T.H. Brandt)
- Shady Sam’s Shelves (Samuel Oatley)
(If you were at PulpFest and are not on this list, please let me know so that I can add you.)
We were the menace once
Let’s go back into the past for a bit, to something that I’ve written about in my contributions over the past few years to the Pulp Era Amateur Press Society.
In 1936, Anita P. Forbes told the National Council of Teachers of English that 90 percent of high-school students were reading pulp magazines, and that this constituted a menace to their morals, their English, and their minds. Ninety percent of high schoolers reading anything at all would be something to celebrate now. In 1936, it was the emergency.
Two years earlier, Arnold Mulder, the head of the English department at Kalamazoo College, writing in The Grand Rapids Press, had gone further. The pulps, he wrote, were “machine-made literature for a vast army of literate people” who couldn’t tell good writing from bad, and who read not out of imagination but to escape the boredom of their own company.
Read that again with Horowitch in mind. Mulder’s readers were certainly literate — they were consuming magazines by the millions — but he didn’t think what they were doing amounted to worthwhile reading.
Horowitch’s concern is different, but related: We remain literate while losing the habit of the sustained, demanding reading that she thinks develops the mind. Ninety-two years apart, both are arguing over what it means to really read.
Horowitch knows this tradition exists, to her credit. She points to a 1900 Atlantic essay by Arthur Reed Kimball warning that newspapers were killing books. Readers, he complained, would turn first to “a curious bicycle adventure” instead of anything improving. Jefferson thought novels were rotting women’s minds. Every medium is the previous one’s decline.
Mulder wasn’t entirely wrong. A man reading Argosy in 1934 was not performing deep textual analysis.
But some of those readers — members of Mulder’s machine-made army, the people written off as not really reading — became the collectors. They kept the magazines. They started the fanzines. They built the bibliographies and the indexes and the amateur press associations. Some of the despised readers turned into the preservers.
An unsigned editorial in The News and Observer of Raleigh saw it coming in November 1936. Answering Forbes, the writer pointed out that the pulps were damned no more heartily than the dime novels and penny dreadfuls of 50 years before, that those generations survived anyway, and that driving the pulps into forbidden secrecy would only guarantee them a wider readership. Kids ought to be reading Longfellow and Franklin, sure. “It is nothing strange if gangsters and G-men are now” more fun, the editorial says.
From letter columns to BookTube
Harold Hersey, who edited many pulp magazines and wrote Pulpwood Editor in 1937, noticed something about the young readers who wrote in to the letter columns. They were sharper than the rest of the audience: “already critical; soon will be hypercritical” and, he figured, not long for pulp fiction.
Hersey wasn’t describing a BookTuber exactly. He thought those increasingly critical readers might eventually leave the pulps behind. But he recognized the type: the reader who doesn’t merely consume a story but starts talking about it and looking for more.
The pulps have always produced critics out of their most engaged readers, and those readers have always used whatever medium was at hand: letter columns, fanzines, amateur press associations, newsgroups and mailing lists, message boards, and, now, video.
I’ve been doing a version of this by mail for years. My contributions to PEAPS are, functionally, a comment thread with a three-month latency. I read everyone else’s zines, I write up my responses, we all wait for the next mailing to come in. Somebody in PEAPS once described the APA as a conversation among pulp fans that just takes a long time to play out. That’s BookTube but at a snail’s pace.
The difference between what Richard, Nick, and the others do and what I do is the delivery system. No one would call PEAPS postliterate.
But Richard, Nick, and the others are reading, and reading for pleasure. And, they were picking up quite a number of pulp magazines at PulpFest because they want to read them. (Check out their PulpFest reports and book/magazing hauls videos.)
What’s (or maybe, who’s) next?
Reading the pulps, of course, isn’t the same thing as collecting them. Someone can become fascinated with Robert E. Howard, Leigh Brackett, Clark Ashton Smith, or any number of other pulp writers through a paperback and never feel the slightest need to own the original magazines. Pulps are fragile. They take up room. Some are expensive. Paperbacks and reprints are a lot more convenient.
But collectors have always been a fraction of the people who read pulp stories, either in paperbacks or reprints. The question isn’t whether every new pulp reader will start filling shelves with old magazines. It’s whether enough of them will become interested in the history and the physical pulps to become the next collectors, researchers, bibliographers, dealers, convention attendees, and preservers.
Maybe someone watches a video about an old paperback, reads the book, follows the author back to the pulps, and eventually shows up at PulpFest.
There’s an irony here that Horowitch’s argument doesn’t quite account for: Video may be crowding out reading generally, but BookTube uses that same medium to encourage people to read. The technology supposedly helping to create a postliterate world may also be one of the ways a reading subculture recruits its next generation.
I want pulp magazine fandom to outlast our generation, and I’m thrilled to see the BookTubers involved. Will they take up our mantle as collectors and preservers? I don’t know. But if, as Horowitch says, apathy is the threat, then based on the past few years at PulpFest, we may be in good hands.
PulpFest 2027 is Aug. 5-8. A BookTuber panel will be on the schedule. Come see for yourself.
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