I’m a fan of John Sloan, the Ashcan School artist who was in his prime a century ago. Most seem to think of him as a respectable also-ran. But his paintings and drawings of New York, concentrating on Sixth Avenue between 23rd Street and Greenwich Village, often dimly lit, move me somehow. I enjoyed the small exhibit of his drawings currently on view at the Museum of the City of New York.

Looking at his depictions of ordinary folk skating, grooming, and marrying, I am struck by how despite the absence of radio, television, or computers, the facial expressions and bodily poses Sloan captured show that a hundred years ago, people were people. Alive, relaxed, us.

Yet from all we hear these days about the decline in how much time Americans spend reading, we are to think that the people in Sloan’s art were more literate. You know: “print culture” before talkies and especially TV.

Which got me to thinking: let’s suppose the people — or at least relatively educated people — bustling around in Sloan’s paintings spent more time with the printed page. We would expect such: there were fewer distractions — film was silent, and the only thing you could broadcast was Morse Code.

But — what were they reading? America in 1907 read more than most of us. But did America of 1907 read smarter than us? Transported back to America in 1907, would we savor a book culture less dumbed down than ours?

Well, let’s take a look at the bestselling fiction of 1907. All 10 were potboilers unknown today. The top seller was “The Lady of the Decoration” by one Frances Little. Others on the list included the likes of “The Port of Missing Men” and “Half a Rogue.” Footnotes.

Yes, Upton Sinclair had published “The Jungle” the year before. But in 1907 it was already old news and off the list — the smarties enjoyed it for a brief spell and that was it. And it wasn’t that marketing could not yet give a book “legs”: “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” clearly no “Gravity’s Rainbow,” held on for both 1902 and 1903. Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth” held on for both 1905 and 1906. But this was the single bestseller of this entire decade still read now.

It is indicative to zero in on a book from the middle of the top 10 list of 1907, “The Brass Bowl” at slot five. The book concerned a young beauty who, for reasons we need not belabor, becomes a burglar and meets a dashing male burglar who happens to be a dead ringer for a wealthy scion of an aristocratic family. In fact, sometimes that very scion poses as the burglar and … well, you know.

This thing was all the rage in 1907 among the strap-hanging New Yorkers Sloan painted back in the day. Reviews even touted the book as uniquely suitable as a diversion during train travel.

You can see why people liked “The Brass Bowl.” It was addictive trash. Early on, the book’s writer Louis J. Vance introduced the scion with this sort of thing: “As, picking its way with elephantine nicety, the motor-car progressed down the Avenue — twilight deepening, arcs upon their bronze columns blossoming suddenly, noiselessly into spheres of opalescent radiance — Mr. Maitland ceased to respond, ceased even to give heed, to the running fire of chaff (largely personal) which amused his companions.”

This is the equivalent of Sue Grafton today, Number One on the Times’ fiction bestseller list this week with her “T is for Trespass,” summarized as “Kinsey Millhone must contend with a woman who has stolen a nurse’s identity in order to take advantage of Kinsey’s elderly neighbor.”

And immediately “The Brass Bowl” was translated into a stage play, with no one indicting playwrights for refraining from hatching original material. The idea was simply that if “The Brass Bowl” was fun, then it would also be fun to see it on stage.

Today stage shows are more often based on films than novels, but the only difference between Sloan’s era and now is that films have sound and are thus more vital sources for adaptation. And never mind that there were, in fact, no fewer than three filmizations of “The Brass Bowl” over the next two decades.

So, the printed pages people who buried their noses most prevalently in 1907 were no more substantial than they are now. The people John Sloan painted were, very much, just us.

And even Louis J. Vance fit right into our modern Enquirer-style sensationalist groove. He was given to ending his evenings alone drinking and smoking in vast proportion in an increasingly soporific state. Late one night in 1933 he was found charred only from the waist up, the upholstery of his chair burned but the wooden frame intact, with the fire having not spread any further into his apartment. The legend is that he died of spontaneous combustion.

As with tabloid melodrama as well as America’s reading habits, plus ça change.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.