always seemed abstract, mechanical dolls to Europeans. 
Tactility is a supreme value in European life. For that reason, on 
the Continent there is no adolescence, but only the leap from 
childhood to adult ways. Such is now the American state since 
TV, and this state of evasion of adolescence will continue. The 
introspective life of long, long thoughts and distant goals, to 
be pursued in lines of Siberian railroad kind, cannot coexist with 
the mosaic form of the TV image that commands immediate 
participation in depth  and admits of no delays. The mandates 
of that image are so various yet so consistent that even to 
mention them is to describe the revolution of the past decade.

     The phenomenon of the paperback, the book in “cool” 
version, can head this list of TV mandates, because the TV 
transformation of book culture into something else is 
manifested at that point. Europeans have had paperbacks from