Since I was a teen during those years, I can personally vouch for the fact that we would have paid money to watch our favorite teen idol take a nap. And somebody with authority knew it!

To follow the rest of your thread, though, my indulgent but wise parents dragged me to Bach concerts, art museums, and historic sites . . . and insisted that I read classical literature to balance out the movie mags I so dearly loved. It worked!

Don’t despair! Even if no one planned, any successful work of art leads to imitation. Unimaginative writers, backed by equally unimaginative publishers or producers, see how close they can come without actually being sued for copyright violations, and Sturgeon’s Revelation is once more proven. This is inevitable, but only really harmful if one is a publisher, studio head or critic.

The good news is that talented writers also pay attention to their fellows. Some of them are able to pick out what made the earlier work appealing, and that way, you get golden ages: swashbucklers from TREASURE ISLAND to THE BLACK SWAN, detective novels from Holmes to Wolfe, and science fiction in the Age of Campbell. But the golden ages and the eras of imitation happen at the same time.

We tend to see only the golden age in retrospect because by then the bad imitations are forgotten and the classic titles and authors are well known. We are now, I think, in a golden age of romantic comedy in book form–but that doesn’t mean no one’s writing dreck.

And, of course, every now and then someone will rudely insist on writing something that can’t be “pitched” easily, since it’s a type not seen before, or one thought to be dead. And then a Conan Doyle, a Hammett, a Heyer or a Tolkien winds up creating an entire genre. As long as there are enough publishers or studios, someone will be desperate enough to give the new idea a try, and then the pattern repeats.

And meantime all the Good Stuff written since the invention of moveable type is available to us within two or three days. Keep a used paperback or a library discard of the best so you can loan it to a young person. If you’ve picked the right combination of book and young person, they’ll want to know if there’s any more like that.

Books may come off high-speed presses in hundreds of thousands, but book lovers are still individually hand-crafted.

I mentioned I read fantasy. This includes vampire novels (I rather like the name ‘vampire shagger’ for some of the newer ones!) Of course, in recent years, this sub-genre has expanded incredibly, presumably for exactly the big-corporation reasons you describe. Due to having only 24 hours in a day and other things I like to read, I’ve read an increasingly small percentage of the total oeuvre, not including the ‘Twilight’ series. I did see the movie, and by all accounts doing yet another remake of a vampire movie seems to have been a great success!

My own opinion was considerably less positive (as John knows, since I emailed him about it). I really don’t understand a teenaged girl who has no interests or ambitions outside her obsession with the local Bad Boy. I know they exist (at least for brief periods during their adolescence), but their story simply doesn’t grip me.

Maybe I’m too old. Finding the girl’s father more attractive than the romantic lead, who inspired a desire to tell him to brush his hair and stop sulking might have been a sign of this!

It’s hard to remember when engulfed in them, but sloughs of despond, however big, do eventually drain away.