A couple of days back, Publishers Weekly noted that Glenn Beck had pushed The Coming Insurrection—the first of Semiotext(e)’s way-left, mega-awesome, pamphlet-style Interventions series—into a sixth printing.

How did an ultraconservative populist crank bring a book like this to the forefront? You might well ask. Beck isn’t exactly known as a fan of the French, their anarchists, or their revolutions. But by telling his viewers, “It’s important that you read this book” and calling it, in more or less the same breath, “quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read,” Beck gave this book to a public that almost certainly would never have found it without him.

This is why Glenn Beck is important to the future of book publishing. Because however he’s doing it and whatever sins he’s committed against reason and good taste, he’s still making books a part of the national conversation and, as the NYTimes noted a few months ago, it doesn’t stop here. Beck actually supports a lot of books and their authors.

And however dangerous he and his opportunistic brand of manipulation might be, he’s not stupid. Glenn Beck knows books can be dangerous, and I agree.  They can be explosive, and Mr. Beck and I both want as much of this kind of dynamite in as many hands as possible.