When you pick up Michael Ward’s After Humanity—a 240-page “guide” to a pamphlet which, in my copy, runs to 49 pages—it is hard not to ask yourself what C.S. Lewis himself would have made of it. Fortunately, he told us. In a short essay later republished under the title “On the Reading of Old Books,” Lewis advanced two arguments for reading old books rather than the modern scholars who comment on them. The Abolition of Man has now become an old book itself, and both arguments apply.
