So there’s this thing you can do with masking tape, where you make a little loop over two fingers and fasten it together and then put one of those loops in each corner of a piece of paper in order to place it on a wall. Though not recognized as an acceptable form of professional art handling at any major museum or gallery, in the late part of the last century this strategy did hold sway as the preferred method to display the carefully curated poster collections of young people in bedrooms across the American Midwest.

Other places had tacks, I’ve heard. Some even used frames (in Beverly Hills, most certainly!). But regular old beige-ish masking tape was my go-to, however dubious its ultimate sticking power, and in complete disregard of its tendency to sort of melt in the summer heat, leaving square grease spots on both wall and artwork, reminiscent of butter pats on slices of hot broiled toast.

My first poster was a 4-page fold out from Dynamite Magazine, a Scholastic™ publication with a popularity rivaling that of TV Guide, Rolling Stone, and the just-published People Magazine, but for schoolchildren. One issue featured a 4-page fold out of The Fantastic Four, the Marvel Comics family of superheroes. This remained on my wall until I went to college, and years later, I mounted it on card stock. And years after that, it’s in the room I’m sitting in right now.

It looks a bit rag-tag, with its tattered and “butter-pat” stained corners, but the original dynamic Jack Kirby illustration (of the team virtually leaping from its flat surface to face down danger of some dire kind) is as vibrant as it was in 1975. Which was… ok, let me figure this out… carry the one…

Wow. 50 years ago.

Technically, that’s vintage. And that’s not just my opinion: one of these posters just sold on eBay for $40. There’s another available for only $20 from someone in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota (just two hours southwest of Minneapolis).

I could go on and on (and on again) about the staying power of the image and the characters and the legacy of storytelling it all represents, but I’m more impressed with the power of paper.

In the year 1455, Johann Gutenberg inaugurated a new invention, the movable press.

Although he reproduced content that had been published before, Gutenberg’s production method generated a version that could be perfectly replicated and distributed, transforming one of literature’s most powerful works into one of the most significant objects ever created, the first printed book.

That very book, the Gutenberg Bible, is available to view at the Library of Congress, with other copies on display around the world.

Each is over 500 years old.

Somewhere, Gutenberg must have a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, a child of our DIGITAL AGE, whose heritage keenly bridges that of physical rendering to digital storage. She probably worked with me at an advertising agency as print became the word “print” with air quotes around it, as technical skills such as paste-up and kerning were interpreted by algorithms, and the simple Xerox™ machine became 4 color, then accurate color, then extremely high resolution, and then FAST.

To be honest, I appreciated all these miracles; they made my job easier and more interesting and allowed me to do more with less. But every “New Point O” technology was like a crab in a barrel, each one eventually crushing the other. Thus, I have, in a drawer right over there, a SYQUEST disk. If this does not “ring a bell”, you are either too old or too young to have heard of one, neither of which you should feel bad about, because they were only relevant for an instant. I also possess three different sizes of floppy disk, a ZIP disk, an optical disk, a CD-ROM and a DVD-R, each digital storage medium invented in the last 50 years, and none of them valid today.

I have moved thousands of files of artwork, literature and information from format to format for the last four decades, ending up with my current hard drives that are so bleeding edge that last month I had to replace two of them after only three years of use. Because they are slow now, and don’t hold nearly as much as hard drives one fifth of their size.

It only took one decade to transform the world from Johann’s to that of his (many many times) great-granddaughter, but the miracles of her age seem fleeting, dependent on electricity and technological relevance that is both constant and unpredictable, like a beach ball tumbling on an “up” escalator.

Add to this mayhem - the production and distribution of music, and the storage of photographs and moving images. Go ahead. Crazy, right?

But an old shoebox filled with photos beats an old shoebox filled with 3.5 inch disks any day. Particularly when the only thing you need to decode the pictures, is enough light.

My friend has a book from 1785.Last time I was at her house, I read it. No problem.

Our most incredible monkey’s paw is social media, which is as intoxicating as it is exhausting. At our most noble, humans produce art to convey emotion, hoping it will drive someone, inspire someone, to action. This is a gentle enterprise, rooted in metaphor, beauty and tension - subtlety and empathic nudging toward awareness.

Social media is not that. It’s a whisky shot with a pickle juice chaser. It’s a red carpet filled with paparazzi right after one of those eye exams where your pupils have to be dilated with those drops. It’s a loud sound in the middle of the night that you get up to investigate but end up stepping on a stray LEGO piece in the dark. It’s built of stimulus, like an iced triple expresso with Red Bull™ instead of water.

Social media feeds the world to us with a soda straw, allowing no control over the experience. It is overwhelming, and completely unstoppable -

- and then it’s kind of gone. Forever. Even if I do remember to click that little button to save something, I RARELY revisit that list because there’s a new world of everything every day - but none of it is tangible. None of it occupies the same world that I do.

So while I may not be able to tell a book by its cover, I do appreciate the covers, because they remind me where I am, inside the book. When listening to a vinyl album, the tone arm patiently marks time on the needle’s path. Photographs take up space in your hands, in your life - and they weigh exactly what I think a memory would weigh - incredibly light individually, but then mysteriously heavy in combination.

I shouldn’t be able to carry tens of films and hundreds of albums and thousands of photos in my pocket. And I don’t, I carry their shadows, and like shadows they are entirely ephemeral - their very essence dependent on whether I remember to charge my phone battery or not. Without power, they are all gone.

Whereas, roughly half the days of the year, in my latitude, if I’m outside - I can read any book by the light of the sun. With a candle, I can read 24 hours a day, all year long. I could even write a letter.

A cell phone without power is not even a good shoehorn.

The world of Gutenberg’s grand(x7) daughter is filled with wonders, but I can’t put most of them on my wall, and much much less than 50 years later, many will be at best obsolete and in the worst cases, inaccessible and/or forgotten, while card stock and laminated paper are still crushing it.

I love the future. It’s great here… I’ve been waiting for it and it is in no way dissapointing. But I do appreciate it in context, because for over 50 years, a simple piece of paper has made me smile almost everyday.

No battery required.

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