Book Expo America is porn for readers. I couldn’t believe how large a space was dedicated to literacy, even if only for a week. It is cheering to see what seem to be so many people flocking to the support of the written word, until one steps outside. The city is busy, fast-paced, and frenetic. Books have almost no place here—in fact, bookstores are increasingly difficult to find. This is the world of finance and action, not quiet, reflective thought. Stepping back into the Javits Center what do I find? As a long-time attendee of academic conferences, I am no stranger to book stalls. In religion conferences one expects to find hundreds of religion titles. Thousands even. One of the surprising aspects of the Book Expo, to my eyes, was the volume of religion titles there. To be sure, they were not the erudite, and recondite tomes that populate religion conferences, but there were many Bibles and many books on faith. The religious, it seems, have always loved their books.

Books offer a stability that is not unlike the ideal of religious teaching. One of the main reasons for the plague of fundamentalisms the world is experiencing is the obvious disconnect between the world of ancient books and a culture that refuses to stand still. Once words are laid down, they have a way of becoming stable, apparently written in stone. To borrow a phrase from those long nights playing hearts or gin rummy, a word laid is a word played. Thus Scriptures, with all their foibles, are born. Even in a world increasingly tied to electronic devices, the written word still voices an air of authority. They may be merely electrons projected onto a glowing screen, but words tell us what we need to know. Some of them may become future bibles.

At Book Expo I found Bibles in child-friendly form. In a world where vegetables are the purveyors of the Gospel truth, and we can’t believe anything that hasn’t been animated by a major corporation, the Deep Blue Kids Bible caught my eye. Based on the Common English Bible, it is not the work of amateurs, but it did bring to mind a scary story I read long ago. (The story and this Deep Blue Kids Bible are only related in the labyrinth of my gray matter, not in any business sense whatsoever.) The story was in a children’s Christian magazine and it still evokes a shudder forty years later, when I recall it. An unthinking parent, it seems, decided to keep rat poison in a peanut butter jar. I really need recount no more of the story than that—as the child lay dying the moment of spiritual crisis came to make that decision for salvation upon his deathbed. I started reading the Bible (KJV, of course) before I was a teen. The Bible is not a children’s book. As I walk through BEA on weary feet, I am very glad for the books, but part of me is somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea.