Growing up, my parents had a few different sets of reference books: a children’s encyclopedia my mom picked up at the grocery store, which I read cover to cover, and a set of World Books from 1952, bought by my grandparents shortly after they’d emigrated from Ireland. In high school, I took a Bulgarian girl to my senior prom, and looked up her native country in the World Book to learn that (I’m paraphrasing) it was firmly under the thumb of godless Communist oppressors. There it was, ideology in print, preserved for all posterity.

The mistake wasn’t owning an out-of-date edition; the mistake, arguably, was cracking the cover in the first place. The encyclopedia in the living room wasn’t a reference tool so much as aspirational furniture, a sign to visitors but mostly ourselves that our living room wasn’t dedicated in its entirety to that pagan idol television. That we were consecrated to knowledge, aspiring to something more than our surroundings…

Print will survive. Books will survive even longer. It’s print as a marker of prestige that’s dying.