Falling from favour: poetry replaces cigarettes in vending machines. Photograph: Getty
"Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it was a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe." So said Gene Hackman's arch villain Lex Luther in the first Superman movie. And you know what, old Lex was on to something.
Lex Luther's quote came to mind when I heard the news that the National Poetry Vending Machine (PVM) is launching on Friday in a Suffolk pub. Is this, I wondered, a renaissance bringing poetry to the people or is it a slippery slope that will see poetry reduced to the pop and puff of a gumball machine?
You have to admire the entrepreneurial spirit of the InPrint team behind the PVM: spotting the lonely sight of 'historic' cigarette vending machines in pubs across the country following the smoking ban, this art and poetry collective thought "a-ha". With the verve of a boy racer souping up a Cortina, these boho types got their hands on the out-to-grass machines and produced boxes of original art and poetry that are "vended for less than a packet of fags!" These packets o' poetry come with their own 'health warnings' - "Poetry Causes Heart Ease," etc.
But buying a packet of fags is not the same as buying into great poetry. There is something at once twee and superficial about the PVM - "Once you are the proud owner of a PVM product, keep it in your pocket and feel good. Or you can leave it lying around to demonstrate your cutting edge approach to culture" - spliced with an adolescent desire to be edgy - "Each work of poetry/art is new, and incorporates the excitement of risk-taking and surprise with little danger of injuring any vital parts of your anatomy." This is like Patience Strong on speed with an Iggy Pop fixation - enough to make you want to reach for the Silk Cut.
But that's the point isn't it? PVM is gate-crashing the fag end of the perceived cool of smoking culture. They're not the only ones. TankBooks' Tales To Take Your Breath Away are a series of classics, from Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych to Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, designed to mimic cigarette packs - the same size, packaged in flip-top cartons with silver foil wrapping and sealed in cellophane. The aim? "TankBooks pay homage to this monumentally successful piece of packaging design by employing it in the service of great literature."
My beef is not so much with the vending machine concept (nice gimmick, and convenient too) or the packaging (I love cigarette packets) as what's being sold. Paris introduced book vending machines in 2005 and at the time the most popular books were The Wok Cookbook and a French-English dictionary, with Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal also proving very popular. I suspect Baudelaire's Les Fleurs was a vending hit for exactly the same reason that PVM and TankBooks are leaping into the gap left by the smoking ban - it denotes a certain cool. What is being sold is not the importance of reading or the content of what is read, the intellectual sweat and grind of grappling with War and Peace (or a chewing gum wrapper if you are an unrepentant deconstructionist) but the idea of the reader and the sort of reader - louche, flaneur, cool - who reads risque books in out-there formats.
Hands up - I like gimmicks, I like good design and I occasionally like to be thought of as cool. But all of that is nonsense as far as reading goes. You cannot sell, vend or otherwise market reading. Reading is at the heart of great culture and that goes deeper than the shop front of cool. Some will always read better books and read bad books better. The rest of as have to work at it. To allow TS Eliot to paraphrase Lex Luther: 'Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum.'
