A couple of my friends had some of their titles go out of print this year. That’s such a hard thing for a writer, to see a book you loved into existence simply go away. Of course, now with self-publishing they can reprint the books if they can get the rights back and if they want to deal with the hassle, but those stories will likely not get the attention they once did.
I was still thinking about those friends when I visited an exhibit called “Analog City: NYC B.C. (Before Computers)” at the Museum of the City of New York last week. Many of the displays were interactive. A man was pecking away at an old electric typewriter. Parents were explaining to their kids how a card catalog worked. My husband and I groaned to our daughter about how many hours we spent in college searching for documents on the microfiche. There was a time when those devices were ubiquitous. We thought they’d never go away. Inventors marveled as their technologies spread across the globe and entered nearly every workplace.
And then one day the telegraph gave way to the telephone and iPods gave way to smart phones. And now many of the devices we once could not live without can be found only in museum exhibits. Progress, so they say.
Artists don’t like to think of our works being replaced. We want to imagine, like Shakespeare, they’ll still be producing our plays 400 years after we…
