When the World Shakes, We Reach for Books

Five Centuries of Reading Through Crisis

Weller Book Works, Salt Lake City, Utah

From my research I have discovered that history reveals a counterintuitive truth, namely, that when the world feels most unstable, when economies collapse and pandemics spread, when political orders fracture and technologies upend daily life, people don’t abandon books, they turn to them in unprecedented numbers.

From Martin Luther’s Reformation pamphlets to COVID-19’s record-breaking sales figures, the pattern holds up with remarkable consistency. In other words books are not casualties of disruption but catalysts for navigating it.

The Original Disruption: Printing Press and Reformation

The relationship between upheaval and expanded readership stretches back to the invention of moveable type itself. When Gutenberg’s press arrived in Europe around 1450, it didn’t merely reproduce existing texts—it catalyzed the Renaissance, the Reformation, and an entirely new relationship between people and ideas.

Book costs dropped to roughly one-eighth the price of a handmade volume, and for the first time, movements could be organized by leaders who had no physical contact with their followers.

Between 1516 and 1521 alone, over half a million copies of Martin Luther’s writings were printed. The technology arrived in tandem with theological, political, and intellectual revolution with each feeding the other.

More upheaval meant more urgency to read, more readers meant more demand for books, and more books meant further upheaval. The cycle was self-reinforcing, demonstrating what would become a recurring historical pattern: crisis expands readership rather than contracting it.

Revolutionary Reading: Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published January 10, 1776, offers perhaps the purest case study of how a single text can both reflect and accelerate revolutionary change. Estimates suggest between 100,000 and 500,000 copies circulated during the Revolution which is an astonishing figure given a colonial population of roughly 2.5 million. An estimated 20 percent of colonists owned a copy, equivalent to 60 million copies in today’s market.

Those who couldn’t buy it borrowed from neighbors; those who couldn’t read heard it read aloud. As historian Eric Foner described, Paine’s pamphlet created “a torrent of letters, pamphlets, and broadsides on independence and the meaning of republican government,” spawning a public conversation that shaped the Declaration of Independence itself. The text became a communal object: debated in taverns, read in churches, passed hand to hand as an act of shared identity formation.

The revolutionary era demonstrates a crucial truth about crisis reading: books don’t merely document upheaval but provide the language through which people understand and participate in it. Paine gave colonists not just arguments but a vocabulary for articulating what they felt but could not yet express.

The Great Depression: When Libraries Became Lifelines

When the stock market crashed in 1929 and the economy contracted through the early 1930s, Americans did not stop reading. Instead, they read more. A July 1933 issue of Publishers Weekly declared that “the reading of books has increased throughout the Depression as shown by library circulation records.” People who could not afford to purchase books flocked to public libraries and bookstore rental libraries.

The genres that thrived like escapist fiction, detective novels, humor reflected a population seeking both distraction and frameworks for understanding their predicament. The hard-boiled detective narrative, which achieved prominence in the 1930s, directly mirrors the hardships of the Depression era. Meanwhile, the Book-of-the-Month Club (founded 1926) and the Literary Guild expanded shared reading experiences that helped make communal reading a mainstream cultural pastime.

This period established that economic hardship doesn’t diminish the appetite for books. Rather, it redirects it. Readers sought accessible, affordable formats and gravitated toward stories that helped them process their circumstances while offering temporary escape from them.

World War II: Books as Weapons

The Second World War produced one of the most dramatic expansions of readership in modern history. In Britain, nationwide blackouts ironically became a boon for bookselling. The Book Society advised readers that “books may become more necessary than gas-masks.”

Consumer expenditure on books more than doubled between 1938 and 1945, and there were more readers, drawn from a wider social class, at the war’s end than at its beginning. Demand consistently outstripped supply despite paper rationing, bomb damage to publishers’ warehouses, and a vanishing workforce.

In the United States, the Armed Services Editions (ASE) program stands as one of the most extraordinary experiments in reading and community-building ever undertaken. From 1943 to 1947, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed more than 122 million paperback copies of 1,324 titles free of charge to American service members across every theater of combat.

Designed to fit uniform pockets and printed in two columns for readability under difficult conditions, these books became, as one GI stationed in New Guinea wrote, “as welcome as a letter from home... as popular as pin-up girls.”

Soldiers who had never finished a book before devoured everything they could find. Men ripped paperbacks apart by chapter so their brothers-in-arms wouldn’t have to wait. The shared reading of contemporary fiction allowed servicemen to maintain an emotional connection with families back home who were reading the same books.

The program’s effects reverberated for decades. The ASEs helped strip away the stigma of paperbacks, democratized book ownership by making reading affordable for the first time, and were partially responsible for higher post-war literacy rates and the surge of veterans enrolling in college on the G.I. Bill.

President Roosevelt’s declaration that “books cannot be killed by fire” was plastered on propaganda posters, and General Eisenhower ensured every soldier storming Normandy carried a paperback in his pocket. Books were, quite literally, weapons in the war of ideas.

COVID-19: The Data-Rich Validation

The pandemic years provide the most comprehensive evidence of the upheaval-reading nexus. Despite initial panic and bookshop closures in March 2020, the publishing industry finished the year astonishingly strong. US print sales rose 8% in 2020, with over 750 million units sold. Audiobooks climbed 17% and ebooks surged 22% over 2019. Then 2021 set an all-time record: 825.7 million print units sold, the highest ever tracked by NPD BookScan, up 9% over 2020 and 21% over 2019.

In the UK, fiction sales climbed by a third in the final week of March 2020, and children’s educational titles rose 234%. Hugo Setzer, president of the International Publishers Association, captured the dynamic: “Self-isolation around the world has seen a boom in reading. Books and reading are the ideal way of escaping our four walls, but also to understand what is happening around us, how to overcome this and how to make our lives better in the future.”

The pandemic reading surge tracked the social upheavals embedded within it. The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 triggered an unprecedented surge in anti-racism literature: by June 21, 2020, almost 70% of the New York Times Best Seller list confronted race. NPD BookScan reported a 330% jump in political science civil rights titles and a 245% increase in books about discrimination in a single week.

Black bookstore owners like Troy Johnson of AALBC reported selling more books in June 2020 than in all of 2019. Titles like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility sold out everywhere, with Black-owned bookstores receiving 100–300 orders per day and shipping internationally.

This data confirmed what history had already suggested: crisis doesn’t just increase reading but directs readers toward texts that help them understand the specific upheavals they’re experiencing.

Political Disruption and Dystopian Mirrors

Political upheaval consistently drives specific categories of book sales. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, George Orwell’s 1984 saw sales increase almost 10,000%, prompting a 75,000-copy emergency reprint by Signet Classics. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale experienced over 200% growth in sales. In 2018, Barnes & Noble reported a 57% spike in political book sales compared to 2017.

The pattern repeated after the 2024 election: The Handmaid’s Tale rocketed up Amazon’s bestseller list by 6,866%, while On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury all surged again. Barnes & Noble’s director of books noted “a massive bump in dystopian fiction” alongside strong sales across the political spectrum. Readers on both sides of the political divide turned to books, some seeking frameworks to resist what they feared, others seeking validation of what they supported.

These surges reveal books functioning as diagnostic tools. When citizens feel their democracies threatened or transformed, they don’t retreat from engagement. Rather, they seek literary precedents, historical parallels, and conceptual frameworks that help them understand whether what they’re experiencing is unprecedented or part of a recognizable pattern.

Why Upheaval Feeds Reading

Across these examples, several interlocking mechanisms explain why disruption drives people toward books. First, sense-making: during periods of confusion and uncertainty, books provide frameworks for understanding what is happening. Whether colonists reading Common Sense or Americans reading anti-racist literature after George Floyd, readers seek texts that articulate what they feel but cannot yet express.

Second, escapism and psychological relief: research has shown that reading can reduce stress levels by up to 68%. The practice of bibliotherapy where books are used therapeutically has roots stretching back to ancient Greece and was formalized in American practice as early as the 1940s.

Third, community formation: from Anne Hutchinson’s 1634 Bible study group to BookTok, shared reading has always been a vehicle for building social bonds. Book clubs, reading circles, and literary salons have historically emerged most powerfully among marginalized groups like women denied education, Black communities fighting for identity, veterans processing trauma, who found in collective reading a space for belonging and self-determination.

Fourth, democratic participation: books enable citizens to participate in the debates of their time. The explosion of Reformation pamphlets, Revolutionary-era broadsides, and contemporary political bestsellers all demonstrate how reading enables individuals to engage with and shape the forces transforming their world.

Closing Chapter

The evidence across five centuries is remarkably consistent: books are not a casualty of disruption but a response to it. When the ground shifts beneath people’s feet—whether through pandemic, war, economic collapse, political revolution, or technological transformation—the human instinct is to reach for a book. Not merely to escape, but to understand, to connect, and to participate in the conversation about what comes next.

Books function as what the British Book Society recognized in 1939: something that may prove “more necessary than gas-masks.” They are the infrastructure of community in moments when other forms of connection have been severed, and the medium through which societies process, debate, and ultimately navigate their most profound transformations. The pattern is ancient, the mechanism is proven, and the next crisis, in whatever form it takes, will almost certainly see readers reaching for books once again.

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