In "Corrupted the Morals of Many a Promising Youth" In the 1790 book Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, Reverend Enos Hitchcock wrote,

The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?

Also, The French statesman Malesherbes railed against the fashion for getting news from the printed page, arguing that it socially isolated readers and detracted from the spiritually uplifting group practice of getting news from the pulpit. A hundred years later, as literacy became essential and schools were widely introduced, the curmudgeons turned against education for being unnatural and a risk to mental health. An 1883 article in the weekly medical journal the Sanitarian argued that schools "exhaust the children's brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies, and ruin their bodies by protracted imprisonment." Meanwhile, excessive study was considered a leading cause of madness by the medical community.

I study geography and Spanish literature, not history necessarily (but what is space without time?). I am currently studying space as perceived in Golden Age Spanish literature, so I will apply the question to that area/era.

Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (1604), widely considered the first modern novel, written not long after the printing press brought books to an increasingly wealthy and leisurely population in imperial Spain, is a parody all about a man who reads too many "libros de caballería" [cavalry books] and decides to go out and live that lifestyle, leaving his family and friends behind.

"Es, pues, de saber que este sobredicho hidalgo, los ratos que estaba ocioso (que eran los más del año), se daba a leer libros de caballerías con tanta afición y gusto, que olvidó casi de todo punto el ejercicio de la caza, y aun la administración de su hacienda [...]".

"It should be known that the aforementioned nobleman, in his free time (which was most of the year), read books of chivalry with such fondness and pleasure that he almost entirely forgot how to hunt and maintain his estate" (Cervantes 38).

Because of their popularity, "the romances were banned from the Indies in 1531 and again in 1553 (a sure sign that the first prohibition had little effect)" (Gerli 185).

Though I do not have personal accounts of addiction to books, the fact that such a problem influenced and served as the basis for the first modern novel is telling of their importance in society.

sources

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha, vol. 1. El país, 2005.

Gerli, E. Michael. "The antecedents of the novel in sixteenth-century Spain". The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, edited by David Gies, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 178-200.