Word: reade
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Eliot, 60, got a nice hand from one of his elders. "I think we all ought to be glad," observed Somerset Maugham, 75, "to have lived long enough to read his poetry...
Charlemagne, who thirsted for culture as much as for conquest,* left his personal stamp on the manuscript art. He used to complain that the prevailing script was too knotty to read; to rectify it the Emperor invited the Northumbrian monk Alcuin to teach the Franks a comparatively simple hand inherited from the days of Roman rule. The script did not stay simple: by the 13th Century, manuscript texts had become as tangled as briar patches. The gnarled letters of ladies' prayer books were twined about with ornamental thorns, and even the page borders swarmed with children and gargoyles...
...miniature paintings sometimes as detailed as murals. Within one huge blue and rose G, an artist had drawn St. Francis kneeling to receive the stigmata (see cut). Gradually the illustrations were separated from the text, and sometimes they almost supplanted it-so that bumpkin barons and illiterate lords could "read" their books like comic strips. They had no trouble identifying each character; the beasts were beastly, the saints saintly, and the maidens maidenly...
What made the manuscripts stand up so well as art? Primarily it was their richness. They were never made to glance at, like a picture on a wall, but to read again & again...
Advertisers listened with foreboding to the results of a survey released by New York City's Duane Jones Co. Of 1,580 TV owners answering a survey, 92.4% were listening to radio less than before they owned TV sets; 80.9% were going to movies less frequently; 58.9% were reading fewer books; 48.5% read magazines less often; 23.9% were even skimping on newspapers...