Over at TNR.com, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the closing of the Washington Post Book World section.

Alas, another nail in the coffin of literary culture in our country.

Yeah, maybe. I can certainly attest to the fact that writing a book—or, more accurately, promoting it—is an extremely challenging and often deeply frustrating and disappointing process.

Still, I can’t help but think that the failure of book review editors to change with the times has much to do with the diminishing viability of these stand-alone sections. No matter how important the subject, people read newspapers for lots of different reasons, and education is just one of them, and not necessarily the highest.

In this, I am partly influenced by one of my earliest and most important experiences in journalism.

When I was in college, I spent a summer interning for a congressman from New Haven, Democrat Bruce Morrison. I wasn’t getting paid, so I took on temp jobs as I could to help pay the rent. One of them was as a weekend telephone operator in the circulation department of the Washington Post. I’d arrive at 6 AM, sit down in front of a computer, and drape a telephone headset over my head. For the next six hours, with a bathroom break or so, I’d take one call after another from Post subscribers with a delivery complaint. Click! A call. Deal with it. The caller would hang up. Click. Another call. And so on.

It was actually a pretty interesting job, because it posed a significant challenge: You knew from the get-go that the people on the other end of the line were pissed. “Good morning, sir. How can I help you today?”

That f’ing paperboy…where the hell is…? …what is wrong with you people?

It was great practice at learning to manage and respond to other people’s anger; listening skills were clearly at a premium. If you could take a caller who was looking for someone to scream at, and by the end of the call have him politely thanking you for your help, well, that was an oddly satisfying thing.

But the process was also fascinating because of what people complained about, particularly on Sundays, when the most common grievance was that a particular section of the paper was missing. If so, we would either have the section redelivered or mail the customer a copy of it, depending on how late in the morning it was. (Both options were far more expensive than any money earned on the paper, so accurate delivery was highly valued.)

And what was the section whose absence people most complained about? The front page? Op-eds? Book World?

Nope. It was the Sunday comics. By a landslide.

And after that, it was “TV Week.”

And after that, sports.

If anyone ever complained about not getting their book review, I don’t remember it.

All of which made me think quite a bit about human nature and the reasons why we read, particularly on a Sunday morning….and reminded me that, as highbrow and high-minded as we journalists would like to be, you can’t forget that people read the paper for lots of reasons, many of which are not the same reasons people write and publish things.

Click.