IRTNOG, by E.B. White (1938)
Apropos of nothing but The Modern Condition (Long-Obtaining), an
extremely short work of dystopian fiction:
Along about 1920 it became apparent that more things were being
written than people had time to read. That is to say, even if a man
spent his entire time reading stories, articles, and news, as they
appeared in books, magazines, and pamphlets, he fell behind. This was
no fault of the reading public; on the contrary, readers made a real
effort to keep pace with writers, and utilized every spare moment
during their waking hours. They read while shaving in the morning
and while waiting for trains and while riding on trains. They came
to be a kind of tacit agreement among numbers of the reading public
that when one person laid down the baton, someone else must pick it
up; and so when a customer entered a barbershop, the barber would lay
aside the Boston Evening Globe and the customer would pick up Judge; or
when a customer appeared in a shoe-shining parlor, the bootblack
would put away the racing form and the customer would open his
briefcase and pull out The Sheik. So there was always somebody
reading something. Motormen of trolley cars read while they waited
on the switch. Errand boys read while walking from the corner of
Thirty-ninth and Madison to the corner of Twenty-fifth and Broadway.
Subway riders read constantly, even when they were in a crushed, upright
position in which nobody could read his own paper but everyone could
look over the next man's shoulder. People passing newsstands would
pause for a second to read headlines. Men in the back seats
of limousines, northbound on Lafayette Street in the evening,
switched on tiny dome lights and read the Wall Street Journal. Women
in semi-detached houses joined circulating libraries and read Vachel
Lindsay while the baby was taking his nap.
There was a tremendous volume of stuff that had to be read. Writing
began to give off all sorts of by-products. Readers not only had to
read the original works of a writer, but they also had to scan what the
critics said, and they had to read the advertisements reprinting the
favorable criticisms, and they had to read the book chat giving some
rather odd piece of information about the writer such as that he could
write only when he had a gingersnap in his mouth. It all took time.
Writers gained steadily, and readers lost.
Then along came the Reader's Digest. That was a wonderful idea. It
digested everything that was being written in leading magazines, and
put new hope in the hearts of readers. Here, everybody thought, was
the answer to the problem. Readers, badly discouraged by the rate
they had been losing ground, took courage and set out once more to
keep abreast of everything that was being written in the world. For a
while they seemed to hold their own. But soon other digests and short
cuts appeared, like Time, and The Best Short Stories of 1927, and the
new Five-Foot Shelf, and Well's Outline of History, and Newsweek,
and Fiction Parade. By 1939 there were one hundred and seventy-three
digests, or short cuts, in America, and even if a man read
nothing but digests of selected material, and read
continuously, he couldn't keep up. It was obvious that something
more concentrated than digests would have to come along to take up
the slack.
It did. Someone conceived the idea of digesting the digests. He
brought out a little publication called Pith, no bigger than your
thumb. It was a digest of Reader's Digest, Time, Concise Spicy
Tales, and the daily news summary of the New York Herald Tribune.
Everything was so extremely condensed that a reader could absorb
everything that was being published in the world in about forty-five
minutes. It was a tremendous financial success, and of course
other publications sprang up, aping it: one called Core, another
called Nub, and a third called Nutshell. Nutshell folded up,
because, an expert said, the name was too long; but half a dozen
others sprang up to take its place, and for another short period
readers enjoyed a breathing spell and managed to stay abreast of
writers. In fact, at one juncture, soon after the appearance of
Nub, some person of unsound business tendencies felt that the digest
rage had been carried too far and that there would be room in the
magazine field for a counter-digest, a publication devoted
to restoring literary bulk. He raised some money and issued a
huge thing called Amplifo, undigesting the digests. In the second
issue the name had been changed to Regurgitans. The third issue
never reached the stands. Pith and Core continued to gain, and
became so extraordinarily profitable that hundreds of other
digests of digests came into being. Again readers felt
themselves slipping. Distillate came along, a super-digest which
condensed a Hemingway novel to the single word "Bang!" and reduced a
long article about the problem of the unruly child to the words "Hit
him."
You would think that with such drastic condensation going on, the
situation would have resolved itself and that an adjustment would
have been set up between writer and reader. Unfortunately, writers
still forged ahead. Digests and super-digests, because of their
rich returns, became as numerous as the things digested. It was
not until 1960, when a Stevens Tech graduate named Abe Shapiro stepped
in with and immense ingenious formula, that a permanent balance
was established between writers and readers. Shapiro was a sort
of Einstein. He had read prodigiously; and as he thought back over all
the things that he had ever read, he became convinced that it
would be possible to express them in mathematical quintessence.
He was positive that he could take everything that was
written and published each day, and reduce it to a six-letter word.
He worked out a secret formula and began posting daily bulletins,
telling his result. Everything that had been written during the first
day of his formula came down to the word IRTNOG. The
second day, everything reduced to EFSITZ. People accepted these
mathematical distillations; and strangely enough, or perhaps not
strangely at all, people were thoroughly satisfied, which would
lead one to believe that what readers really craved was not so much
the contents of books, magazines, and papers as the assurance that
they were not missing anything. Shapiro found that his bulletin
board was inadequate, so he made a deal with a printer and issued a
handbill at five o clock every afternoon, giving the Word of the
Day. It caught hold instantly.
The effect on the populace was salutary. Readers, once they felt
confident that they had one-hundred-per-cent coverage, were able to
discard the unnatural habit of focusing their eyes on words every
instant. Freed of the exhausting consequences of their hopeless
race against writers, they found their health returning, along with a
certain tranquility and a more poised way of living. There was a
marked decrease in stomach ulcers, which, doctors said, had been the
result of allowing the eye to jump nervously from one newspaper
headline to another after a heavy meal. With the dwindling of
reading, writing fell off. Forests which had been plundered for
newsprint, grew tall again; droughts were unheard of; and people
dwelt in slow comfort, in a green world.
