Nose in a Book

I’ve been thinking about physical books lately: the size of what we read versus the size of smartphones; how the US military passed out more than 120 million paperbacks to soldiers during World War II; the history of mass market paperbacks (which aren’t much bigger than smartphones) and who buys hardcovers; and the so-called crisis of reading that I’m both aware of and insulated from here at the Review. I decided to do some extremely unscientific research and count the number of people reading books on the subway. I made a diagram of each car I rode in, making a mark on the seats where a person was reading a physical book. I saw the greatest number of books per car on the G train, which connects Brooklyn to Queens. Most passengers were reading paperbacks, though I did have the odd hardcover sighting. I saw Salinger and Dostoevsky and Suzanne Collins. Most titles I could not make out from where I was sitting or standing.This newsletter, covering the art and illustrations in the past four issues of the magazine, comes to you from those notes. (The red letters or numbers at the bottom of each diagram indicate which train I was on.) The cover of the Fall Books Issue was graced with a p...