Crossposted from my newsletter, where you can view the post with images

Dear friends,

I have been re-reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, for the first time since I initially read them as a teenager. I know this because I have kept a record of every book I have read since 2009, the year I graduated from college—a document that grows more and more precious to me. In fact, I find with a search that I have read no Le Guin at all in that time except for The Dispossessed in 2023. That seems like an oversight. I will need to read a lot more of her work soon.

I didn’t like the Earthsea books much as a teenager. As best I can recall, I think I found Ged, the protagonist, an offputting character (as he is, at times, though this changes over the course of the series) and I was also troubled by my (correct) perception that Le Guin didn’t share my worldview. Reading them now, these adolescent gripes don’t trouble me. I am instead bowled over by her prose, which is gracious and precise, and by the surprising and resonant turns the plot takes. I have only just begun the sixth and last book, but thus far two books are real highlights: The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, both of which adopt the perspective of a female character, Tenar the former priestess of Atuan.

I’m not setting out here to comment on Le Guin’s craft, however, but on the craft of publishing. The Earthsea books make an interesting illustration of how book publishing has shifted in our culture, illustrated by the copies held by my college library. The library appears to have acquired the Earthsea books as they were issued and so they hold if not first editions at least relatively early ones. Since Le Guin published the books over a span of decades—the first three in the 1970s, the latter three in the 1990s and early 2000s—the differences are striking, particularly in the use of illustrations. All three of the 1970s books feature black and white illustrations at the head of every chapter. Although the books employ two different illustrators, the style is consistent, a kind of woodcut look, featured on both covers and interiors. The art is very striking and, to my eye, fits well with the way the books invoke traditional cultures and light/dark imagery.

In the later books, the line art has been replaced by full-color paintings or, in the case of Tales from Earthsea, what appears to be a stock photo. None of the three has any interior illustrations whatsoever, despite the fact that Le Guin was a far better known and more successful writer at this time than when she wrote the original books. To my eye, the art of these books is less attractive, less visually cohesive, and less suited to Le Guin’s work. I am drawn instinctively to the 1970s texts; the 1990s books look like any other cheap fantasy cover, to my eye at least, even if the paintings are well executed.

From the point of view of a publisher, illustrations represent an investment—they require paying an illustrator as well as increased printing costs. The Earthsea books show that these costs have diminished over time to an extend: the full-color covers of the later books would have been incredibly costly or perhaps technologically beyond reach in the 1970s. But in general the later books show less investment in the craft of bookmaking. The absence of interior illustrations and visual cohesion suggests that the publishers in the 1990s were not confident they could make good on that investment in visual art, whereas Le Guin’s 1970s publishers felt that such an investment would come good, even for a first-time children’s book from a lesser-known author.

The changes in the art of the Earthsea books tells the story of a declining literary culture in our country, with publishers investing less in bookmaking over time because they are less certain of a return on that investment. Although graphic design and bookmaking technologies have improved in a variety of respects, getting more powerful, cheaper, and more accessible, without a strong reading public to purchase their goods they are not turned to the best use. And this trajectory has continued: literary books today seldom feature illustrations, and hardback copies of literary texts are an endangered species. Print-on-demand paperbacks are the norm today even for accomplished, marketable writers, reflecting a diminished market for books and a loss of the value we once placed on beautiful bookmaking.

I should note that my library has one other copy of the Earthsea books, the one-volume complete edition illustrated by Charles Vess and published in 2018. It is a massive hardcover book with lavish full-color illustrations and a ribbon for marking your place. Maybe things aren’t so bad if there’s a market for such a book today? I’m not so sure. Despite the beauty of the Vess edition, I have avoided reading from it in favor of checking out the older single-text copies of the books. It’s simply too massive for practical reading. At nearly a thousand pages of text, it’s bigger than my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. I tend to read novels in bed as I am falling asleep, but I could not do so with the one-volume Earthsea. I dropped it off my nighstand and almost broke my toe. Such a large book, however, almost requires you to be sitting up at a desk to read it. It is fundamentally a format made for study—or display—not for normal reading.

You can’t see here how big this thing is, but it’s huge

So what the Vess edition suggests is not so much that we have a healthy literary culture, but that reading classic works has become a luxury good, a kind of conspicuous consumption rather than a normal way of passing the time during the day. It is not a return to the beauty of the 1970s books, which assumed that children or ordinary adults might enjoy looking at beautiful, simple illustrations in a mass market novel. It is a shift to beautiful bookcraft as a luxury good.

There are lots of publishers out there still making beautiful books—the skills and technologies have not disappeared—but it would take a widespread cultural shift back toward reading, and reading in hard copy, to return us to the culture that made those 1970s Earthsea books possible. It’s a shame. Cheap paperbacks have their place, but great books—which are still being written—deserve a presentation that accords with their quality, and one that doesn’t render the book merely an object for display. In our current literary economy, though, such books are rare. It’s a shame. We would have a healthier culture of reading if the everyday experience of a book was to handle and view something beautiful.