Now, I am no sort of fashionista but I am a sucker for handbags. I have too many. I would never spend thousands of pounds on one but I often buy one when I have gone shopping for something quite other. I love the Fashion in Handbags. So, imagine a world in which there is only one handbag. I do not mean, One as in ONE, I mean, one design and style of handbag. Your handbag designers have all decided that from henceforth they will kill off variety and colour and difference of shape and size and decorative feature. From now on they will produce, all of them, just one handbag. So we all carry the same. It is grey. It has no texture. It is square, let us say, 9 inches square. It has a  handle and one inner pocket for money. The lining is a slightly paler grey. And, er, that`s it. No matching outfits. No browsing the display in Accessorize or Debenhams or  Bags'rus. No black or tan or cream or white or pink or violet or blue or sage of taupe. No saddle or hobo or messenger or man-bag, or oversized or glittery evening poche, no Louis V or Radley or Chanel quilted. Imagine the shop displays. Imagine how we would all feel -as if a fun element had gone from our lives. And as everyone who has ever gone to an outdoor market will testify, handbags in all shapes and sizes and colours and knockoffs can be had to brighten the day from around a couple of quid. 

Oh, our standard issue handbag will certainly hold what we need. Keys, cheque book, wallet, pen, phone, tissues, driving licence, polo mints, lipstick, mirror. We will not be able to say we NEED any other sort. But we will WANT other sorts. Because a light, some fun, some beauty and choice and charm and diversity and colour and all the rest of what cheers us up and keeps us going will be gone from our lives. And to think, it was the handbag designers who got together to bring all this about.

Are you there yet ? This being the season of Pentecost, and though we no longer believe that people speak or ever spoke in tongues,  we can still speak in Parables and find some wisdom. My Parable is this. The Kingdom of the Book is like unto a handbag.

For handbag, just substitute 'e-reader.'

Imagine the charm and fun, diversity and colour of the average Bookshop in Anytown. The different jacket designs, the formats, the sizes, the printing, the paper, the leather binding and the cheapo paper, the cloth, the shiny, the matt laminate with spot varnish, the visual sign which tells you, without needing to read a word, that this is a Faber Literary Novel and that is an AmericanThriller, this a chiclit, that a misery memoir and over there an Alexander McCall Smith if ever I saw one. But no, no, these are all swept away. Instead, there is your e-reader. Plastic. Uniform in size. Colourless. Fun-less. Charmless. Utilitarian. A concrete neo-Fascist tower block, a pre-Cold War Russian Communist, State-designed and manufactured sort of thing.

Oh, it will allow you to read all sorts of stuff on its featureless and characterless face. It holds your wallet and your car keys OK.

But is it really, really what you want ? And to think, it is being foisted upon us with all possible speed, by the shootthemselvesinthefoot members of the Book Trade.

In a recent survey it was discovered that word-of-mouth is no longer the most important thing in book marketing. People are said to be most influenced by book store displays and promotions.  Well, that won`t be the case if the e-reader pushers get their way. And think of the economic consequences - and here I am being  very serious. Think of the job losses in the publishing and printing industries. They would run into tens upon tens of thousands. It takes few workers to prepare e-texts to download onto e-readers.  No designers, printers, booksellers, shops. I wish people would think these things through.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.  The novel is not dead and nor is the poem or the biography or indeed the Parable. But in my most depressed mood, and looking around at the infinite variety of books, I half think they might as well be.

Repent, for the end of the book is nigh. Save the Book. And the handbag.