I’m Moving to France

Not really, because I can’t speak French (aside from the kind one begs pardon for using, which isn’t really French at all), and I look silly in a beret. But I love this idea so much that it almost makes me want to pick up some French tapes, learn to love coffee, and up my cigarette intake by three packs a day:

Readers craving Homer, Baudelaire or Lewis Carroll in the middle of the night can get a quick fix at one of the French capital's five newly installed book vending machines.

"We have customers who know exactly what they want and come at all hours to get it," said Xavier Chambon, president of Maxi-Livres, a low-cost publisher and book store chain that debuted the vending machines in June. "It's as if our stores were open 24 hours a day."

Stocked with 25 of Maxi-Livres best-selling titles, the machines cover the gamut of literary genres and tastes. Classics like "The Odyssey" by Homer and Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" share the limited shelf space with such practical must-haves as "100 Delicious Couscous" and "Verb Conjugations."

[…]

Regardless of whether they fall into the category of high culture or low, all books cost a modest $2.45.

I’m sure there are those who find the idea of being able to buy Baudelaire from a vending machine just the greatest indignity to literature ever delivered by humankind, but they’re wrong. (That was Tom Clancy.) The notion that great writing is beyond such commonality is a modern invention; Dickens wrote for the newspaper, his work published as serials just like Bridget Jones. The greatest writers of the western canon were never as pretentious as those who now collect their works on Ikea shelving, moaning about the horrors of pocket-sized printings and modern theatrical interpretations.

The great ones would have loved to find their books in vending machines for a reasonable price, because they wrote for people, common people, not for dusty, Swedish shelves.