A board game café in Derbyshire, England. The bell rings, the chatter stops, and nine people spend the next hour somewhere else entirely. Emma Bent (40), who runs the gathering four times a month, calls it “definitely a social gathering”; a 22-year-old is more precise — “a kind of parallel play.” Nobody reads the same book, nobody has to talk, and silent book clubs are multiplying worldwide: from a San Francisco wine bar in 2012 to more than 2,000 chapters in 60 countries, with 150 on the grass in Paris and 250 in a 400-year-old Dutch church.

So why now? This trend is not about reading. It is about two deficits created in the past five years.