Today, so it seems, the world of writing and of the intellect is open to everyone

From My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, a collection of essays by Hermann Hesse.  The Magic of the Book is an essay from 1930.  

Today all this is apparently completely changed. Today, so it seems, the world of writing and of the intellect is open to everyone; indeed he is forcibly initiated into it if he hesitates. Today, so it seems, being able to read and write is little more than being able to breathe or at most knowing how to ride horseback. Writing and the book have apparently been divested of every special dignity, every enchantment, every magic. In religious circles, no doubt, there is still the concept of the “holy” book based on revelation; but since the single, still really powerful religious organization in the Occident, the Roman Catholic Church, puts no great value on seeing the Bible distributed as reading matter, there are in reality no holy books at all except those of a small number of orthodox Jews and the members of a few Protestant sects. Here and there the requirement may still persist that, when taking an oath, the person swearing must place his hand on the Bible; this gesture however is only a chill, dead remnant of a once blazing power and for the average person contains, like the form of the oath itself, no magical force whatever. Books have ceased to be mysteries, they are accessible to everyone, so it seems. From a liberal, democratic point of view this is progress and is accepted as a matter of course; from other points of view, however, it is a devaluation and vulgarization of the spirit.