Booktok and manga: the gentle revolution

This article on the gentile revolution is published in the 22-23 issue of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 6 June 2023

The publishing market and large bookshops are changing, and for the better. After having risked depopulating and becoming cafés surrounded by books as a backdrop, they are once again becoming centers of relationships and encounters, community places with books at the center and the rest on the sidelines. A library produces meaning in a community when it applies, more or less voluntarily, the principles of synergistic agriculture, i.e. when it creates integrated and interconnected systems, emulating the principles of the natural ecosystem and exploiting the positive relationships between the various players. Books, like plants, have various “nutritional needs” and interact with each other for mutual benefit.

For many years this has not happened, but now a renewal of meaning is taking place thanks to two major vectors: the booktok phenomenon – books told on social networks, especially TikTok – and manga, which are taking up more and more space between shelves and shop windows. Manga are successful because they tell universal stories through the obsession with details, which trigger a great emotional impact in the reader, making often complex themes, such as love and death, usable, even among the very young.

It’s easy to cry scandal, the disappearance of culture and the lowering of quality. But the cases in question are much more interesting than they might seem at first glance, and it would be a serious mistake to reduce the scope of the change under way to “entertainment for young people”. Rather, it is good to dwell on the way in which culture is renewing itself despite the widespread inability of the old establishment to provide excitement, meaning and direction to the new generations.

At the Book Fair we took part in a meeting organized by the Star Comics publishing house on manga and comics as major arts, capable of recounting complex themes and offering quite a few real masterpieces, and in a panel of ilLibraio dedicated to romance, the genre of sentimental publishing that goes crazy on social media. In both cases we have highlighted an incontrovertible fact: not only are these two new sectors holding up the market, but they are also changing the physical relationship with books and generating very strong reading communities.

The book object is once again three-dimensional, as complex as it always was until a few decades ago, and the book-form appears almost as important as the content. And this is not only the sign of the degradation of time, but also the return to a centrality of the object which returns to be evaluated also for the grain of the page, for the weight of the cover paper, for the quality of the internal prints. And the constantly growing reading groups are making up for the disappearance of sections, speakers and meeting places in general. It’s a huge opportunity, and to look only at the negative side of it would really be a waste.

A while ago we took our daughter to a theater. The meeting was conducted by three bookmakers who took the stage and, after a few pleasantries, began a live reading. For three hours, four hundred boys and girls each read their own book, in silence but together. Isn’t this a gentle revolution?

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