Once upon a time, films started to be in color, filled with music, song, and dance - building the commercial empire we know today as America. Then the 1960s kicked in with an anti-society that deliberately shocked and appalled the world with violence, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, the worst of them all: fowl language. This deterred many movie goers to retreat to books, where romance and horror were more adventurous than destructive, more escapist than down-and-dirty, and where fantasies were kept modestly "in-the-know".

Today, we read on our laptops, tablets, and cellphones. We pay for subscriptions and downloads, and our library is privately kept in this magical world, called the internet. Leaving only furniture, decor, and our very fashion to be the very few things people can touch in our private lives. Even money isn't touchable anymore. It's like texture was made for mere visual effect alone.

Walking in the malls, or in the streets, printed books are just history, legends even. Found in museums, the mailbox, and sometimes grocery shops. Not too many look, but there are a few independent book stores left in Los Angeles, but only those that care will ever ask where they are.  They were everywhere, once. But the generation that made them a necessity in our modern world are gone. Now, these indie book shops are left with editions of fantasy novels and western stories that no one will ever recognize, or care for. What do we do with them now?

Obviously, the pessimist in us all believe that they will be forgotten, lost, and tossed in the trash. The optimist may hope, but with the digital world engulfing everything we hold dear, in this sad Matrix-esque future, these precious things with spines and pages, aromatic and solid in mass, may just be forgotten relics. Someday, no one may remember James Joyce, or Ayn Rand, or even Ray Bradbury. Just as much as no one knows now of Johnson, Marlowe, or Burns. It's a killer, but it is real. The fantasy for the modest may have just found its proper grave: "in-the-know". And with any luck, someday, maybe, we'll have more unknown authors resurface, and a new generation of readers will bring the love for these paper weights, we have in our lives, that people once called books.