Long Live Books!

THERE IS A WONDERFUL BOOKSTORE in Greenwich Village, New York. I've never been there, and I only found out about it recently. Its called "The Strand". It must be wonderful, being a bookstore, and being in Greenwich Village. It must be one of those iconic cultural spots in the Big Apple which one must see. The good news is that book sales at The Strand are way up over the past few months! The significance of this is, as usual, as follows: as it goes in New York, so it usually goes, eventually, in the rest of the nation. Books on paper, physical books, are one of the great wonders of the universe, and must not vanish. We humans are real killers, and we slaughter each other like the vicious beasts that we are, and we have killed many a species, but we must not kill books. Books must not go extinct. Animals that humans are, they are brilliant, and books are a sublime invention. Books are an evolutionary step forward in efficiency from scrolls, and books really feel good in human hands; people love books, and must not, will not let them vanish, even in the encroaching age of computers and digital electronic information storage and transfer. Thirty years ago I predicted that books were going to become extinct, because of computers. I thought I was being realistic. I'm sure I'm not the only one who used to think that. Fifteen years later, fifteen years ago, I made the same prediction, in front of a class in a high school library. Boy, was I ever wrong. I loved to read from the git go. Dick, Jane, and Sally had me at "run spot run". By the time I was ten, in 1965, I had a small book collection. By the time I was thirty, I had thousands. When my father, the real bibliophile, died, I gave away my books to a worthy cause in honor of dad. I'm glad I did. I don't need books in my home, I have the internet. But I check out books from local libraries constantly,knowing that I need only return them within two weeks, and I won't be burdened with owning them. And its a great blessing to be able to read paper bound books, in this super advanced computer age. May we forever have books on paper.