From Horizontal to Vertical Reading: Reclaiming Permanence in the Age of Mass Publishing

Europe suffers from an acute illness of impermanence. Instead of building what should endure, be beautiful, and be worthy of inheritance, Europe now looks first to utility and efficiency. However, utility and efficiency do not create permanent structures; they teach a civilisation to reduce itself and, in the long term, leave nothing worthy behind. 

This culture of ephemerality also extends to books and reading. The publishing industry, together with self-publishing, now produces more books than any previous age. In 2025 alone, around four million new books were published in the English language, yet very few of them, if any, will last beyond one, five, or ten years of reading. Bookshops display political commentary tied to election cycles, business books attached to trends or almost indistinguishable from one another, self-help manuals, and novels forgotten soon after they are read. Not all of these books are useless, but their usefulness belongs to the short term: learning a skill, following a trend, or becoming acquainted with the ideas of a politician. They are not works of permanence that have the power to endure for decades, centuries, or millennia. In previous centuries, a printed book carried weight because printing required paper, ink, binding, labour, and institutional support. One might think of Cosimo de’ Medici, who patronised Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato into Latin in fifteenth-century Florence.

When people practise what today passes for sustainability, they usually emphasise consuming less, reducing harm, and shrinking one’s footprint in the world. This is environmental protection built on a metaphysics of erasure: it does not encourage a civilisation to leave anything worthy behind, since everything must become biodegradable and disappear without trace. But when leaving no footprint becomes the highest ideal, civilisation itself is degraded, as if it had nothing worthy of inheritance. Permanence, a potential conservative alternative to sustainability, asks a different question: not ‘how can I reduce my footprint?’ but ‘what is worthy of being left to the generations that come after me?’ Applied to books, this means asking not how to minimise their impact but which books deserve form in the first place, and perhaps even everlasting form, because a book at its highest is not merely data printed on paper but a vessel of cultural continuity.

Modern reading has become what a Traditionalist might call ‘horizontal reading.’ It moves from trend to trend, consumes books as temporary objects, and rarely returns to them. Manuals, travel guides, pop non-fiction, election-cycle books, technical books that soon require second or third editions, and commercial fiction all belong largely to this realm. Vertical reading is the opposite: it is orientated towards works that have survived for centuries and do not exhaust themselves with one reading or even one generation. Homer; Virgil; Dante; the Greek myths; the Eddas; the Bible; Aesop; the Brothers Grimm; Hans Christian Andersen; and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince continue to shape imagination, soul, culture, and memory because they belong not to the passing market but to civilisation.

The irony of modern publishing is that it often reverses this hierarchy. Horizontal books are mass-produced with attractive covers, while vertical works are often issued in unsophisticated or ugly editions, even though they deserve the greatest care. This produces horizontal libraries: collections of random books accumulated without hierarchy, unified only by the fact that one happened to read them. A vertical library, by contrast, would contain beautiful editions of the best works Europe has to offer, together with the smaller works that give each people its particular voice. Not books to be consumed, but works that continue to shape the imagination, feeling, and meaning of their respective peoples.

One objection to digital reading is that an e-book is often not truly owned but accessed. The deeper problem is not digital reading itself but the metaphysics of ownership: the reader often cannot lend, resell, donate, or fully possess the book because he has purchased access rather than possession. Blockchain technology, and especially the Non-Fungible Token, could alter this by giving digital works a unique, transferable form of ownership. If applied properly to e-books, such technology could allow readers to own, resell, lend, or donate them. From the perspective of Permanence, ‘horizontal’ books should circulate primarily in the digital realm rather than acquire physical form. Physical reading, by contrast, would belong to a higher threshold, connected to works that have transcended their own moment and become archetypal, civilisational, and worthy of inheritance.

Even so, digital books need not be soulless or ugly. Designers, typographers, illustrators, and artists using new digital tools could give them beautiful covers, typography, page design, and even forms of digital page-turning impossible in physical books. Yet all this beauty must remain subordinate to hierarchy. A book should not be judged by its cover but by whether it has marked its civilisation deeply enough to deserve physical form. 

This older weight of print has been weakened by industrial abundance. Scarcity once imposed a threshold because printing required material, labour, and cost. Modern publishing has weakened that threshold. The supply of physical books has grown beyond what anyone could read in a lifetime, diluting the weight once attached to physical form. Applied to publishing, Permanence would ask which books are worthy of being given physical form. Should that honour belong to a book written for one election cycle, or to Homer, Gilgamesh, the Eddas, the Greek myths, Aesop, the Bible, and Dante, which have survived for millennia and inspired countless works after them? A true ecology of reading would not treat matter itself as waste but would restore discrimination between higher and lower uses of matter. Selective physical publication would also restore beauty by allowing each edition to be treated as an artistic object. But Permanence must not be worship of the past. Every classic was once new—whether Tolkien, Homer, or Goethe—but such works became timeless because they touched archetypal realities and entered the civilisational memory of a people. If a new work first circulating digitally survives for decades, calls readers back to it, lights up the imagination of a culture, and inspires other worthy works, then it too may deserve to cross the threshold into physical form.

This does not mean every digital work must remain immaterial. If an author writes a book, he may still print a small number of copies to give to family and friends, place on his own shelf, or leave to his children. These private editions would belong to affection and memory, not to civilisational inheritance. Selectivity would also restore the authority of print as a threshold. If physical publication were no longer inflated by the mass circulation of ephemeral books, then encountering a printed work by an unknown author would carry a different meaning. It would not be merely another product among millions but a sign that the work had been judged worthy of preservation, beauty, and inheritance within Europe or one of its peoples.

A hierarchy in which ephemeral books remain digital while only the highest works cross into physical form would also change the ambition of authors. In the horizontal publishing world, writers compete for visibility, attention, and immediate sales. They write with a short-term horizon: to produce a business card, build a personal brand, ride a trend, or capture a market. But if physical books became a mark of the highest quality a civilisation can offer, authors would be encouraged to aim beyond the present moment. They would write in the hope that their work might transcend the digital, take beautiful physical form, and enter the Valhalla of printed books. They would compete not merely for attention or clicks, but for depth, quality, and the possibility of creating something that could outlive them.

Books of use and ephemerality are not contemptible; they teach skills, serve practical needs, and offer lighter forms of leisure. But books that belong to vertical reading and are worthy of inheritance should be granted physical form only after they have transcended the noise of mass publication: when readers return to them decade after decade and discover new meanings within them. This would make Guillaume Faye’s archeofuturism concrete in the realm of publishing: ancient hierarchy joined to modern technology. It would also give conservatives a positive ecology of reading, one that publishes fewer physical works but treats those that do appear in physical form not merely as products but as vessels of civilisation across time.