I admit, I'm astounded.

Why assume that any decline in literacy is a cultural disaster? Most people were just reading crap. Here’s a heaping dollop of pulp fiction, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, September 1930:  “Now Sarka could see plainly the dome of his laboratory, and from the depths of him welled up that strange glow which Earthlings recognize as the joy of returning home, than which there is none, save for the love of a woman, greater.” I’d like to dig this writer up and sock him in the nose. Every word in that sentence, even the tiniest preposition, is screaming “let me die.”