Sounds like a really interesting place! I enjoy paper books and actual bookstores as well, though I agree with you that they are unfortunately doomed.
It doesn’t help that a lot of these charming locally-owned stores have very limited hours. Like this one: “Closed Mondays through Wednesdays”? That doesn’t work for those of us who are impatient enough to go order it online if we can’t get it RIGHT NOW.
Nice analogy.
It IS very difficult to use a contracted map.
I still enjoy spreading one out (unfolding and all) and then seeing the relative positions of locations. I learn something every time. In my home office, all of the walls are festooned with maps. Some early maps that have nothing to do with reality. One of Middle Earth. But the main one is of our current planet with all of the current cities and countries clearly delineated. I always look at it when I read some international event to see where the heck this is happening. I can’t imagine an intelligent human doing otherwise (unless they have completely memorized the map of the world and recreate it in their memory and if so, well you are superior to me.)
Geography is important.
As they say in real estate, ‘location, location, location.’
Interestingly enough, one of the things I learned about when coming to Japan is that they have very different rules of cell phone etiquette than Americans do. When you board a train, for instance, signs in English and Japanese remind you to silence your phone, and request that you not use it at all near the “Priority Seating” (seats set aside for disabled and elderly passengers).
What I’m kinda not looking forward to is the eventual sci-fi-becoming-reality of communications devices that are just attached to you. “Sorry I missed your call, I forgot my subdermal cranial tele-implant on the kitchen counter when I left in a rush this morning” just won’t ring as true. 
I’m hoping paper books don’t go away, and I suspect that they will remain in some capacity, even if it ends up being an on-demand printing kind of thing (“Amazon.com, in a partnership with Kinkos, now features on-site printing of all books available in the Kindle Store!” or something like that). In my current job, we have a LOT of printed publications. Regulations, guidelines, procedures, manuals, etc. Most of it is now available only in an electronic format, much to the chagrin of people that don’t want to have to be on their computer to look up some small but world-shakingly important detail concerning the exact placement of nametags. :eek:
For the record, I own a Kindle, and I love it. Still not inclined to take it into the bathtub with me though.
Reminds me of a story I read about General Arthur MacArthur, the father of General Douglas MacArthur, who would become famous in World War II for his corncob pipe and aviator shades. Arthur MacArthur received orders to proceed to a former Spanish colony that the Americans had won in their recent war with Spain, a group of islands known as the Philippines, and assume command of the occupational forces there.
The very first thing he did was pull his atlas off the shelf and spend a considerable amount of time trying to figure out exactly where the heck he was going. Nothing teaches you geography like having to figure out how to spell the name of the place you are about to live in.
Was it by Dr Seuss?
One that I don’t think has been mentioned yet: really loud, clicky keyboards. I cannot STAND keyboards that don’t make noise, and not just because I like the clicky sound (though I do), but because I honestly believe that they’re just not quality keyboards. Most of today’s quieter keyboards look, feel, and sound cheap.
Good news: you can still find vendors selling the IBM Model M keyboard. Bad news: I haven’t been able to find one that they modified to work with USB.
—Signed, Vicullum, who regrets to this day throwing out all his father’s old computer parts and misses clicky keyboards too.
How about a genre of music?
'Scuse me, but the blues is getting tanked out. And I sound just like the folks that said that when
- Robert Johnson died
- Big Bill Broonzy died
- Honeyboy Edwards died …
Anbody remember when Paul Oliver introduced Jimmy “Dawson” at an early Ann Arbor Blues Festival 
And I DO MISS TYPOGRAPHY! Hot Lead!
Ha, you rang?My garage…
Hey, howya doin’? Yowsa, yowsa!
Pens. Really good quality fountain pens. And paper that’s made to take liquid ink, soak up part of it and let the rest dry beautifully. Not on the critically endangered list, but definitely on the ‘unnecessary luxury item and therefore priced accordingly’ list. A possible candidate for extinction through gentrification.
I still use fountain pens with calligraphic nibs to write out a) things I’m trying to memorize or b) poetry. I first re-discovered calligraphy when I was back at University as a 45 year old, taking Russian 100. It was incredibly useful having a pen that forced me to slow down, write neatly and carefully and think about every unfamiliar step in writing Cyrillic. From there, I applied it to writing study notes, writing out translations, writing out lyrics or lines I needed to memorize, and finally, my own poetry. Prose, I still compose at the computer, but poetry is written by hand and then transcribed to the digital age.
There’s something truly magical about the first marks a fountain pen makes on a fresh page, as though your hand is a figure skater on a sheet of ice the zamboni has just finished. Again, I’m very lucky - there is a shop near me that is still doing well, selling paper, pens and organizers. I’ve no idea if it will still be there in ten years, or whether I’ll be making my own ink out of oak gall, ashes and red wine and using goose feathers to write with.
Good news for old fashioned pen lovers. The kind you refill from an ink well. There’s a lever on the pen that sucks the ink into it.
I know of two programmers at work that use the old pens because of Carpal Tunnel. Their doctors had them make the switch from the regular ball point. For some reason people grip ball points harder & press down on the paper harder. It aggravates Carpal Tunnel. Both these guys wear splints and one already had surgery. So they should know what is the least painful to use.
If other carpal tunnel patients use these pens too then there will always be a market for them.
How totally cool! Thank you for that!
Yeah, I think I heard about this on the radio. If I ever get a desktop computer again (been using laptops for awhile now), I might consider getting one. My boyfriend thinks I’m nuts, but there you go.
…and on the other side of the linecaster…
Relevant to the turn this thread has taken, I also have a number of fountain pens I use at work. Which is a bit ironic, because I have the worst handwriting. I have all these fantastic Rhodia notebooks, a pile of great pens, and pages of appalling chicken scratch.
Pork Rind … you ROCK! And tell me about the guitar & awards on the shelf behind the linotype !!!
BTW, my first job (after university) was for “Where” Magazine in Chicago. You know, that freebie hotel rag that had listings for events, shopping, restaurants … in 1971 it was printed with HOT LEAD. My job was to proofread, & get the bad worn-out lines 'o type re-set … I wish I couldv’e learned how to operate one. I got stuck learning phototypesetting instead :smack:
Of course, bookstores and used bookstores, as everyone else has said.
They’re disappearing from everywhere I’ve known, but in the Boston area I was extremely sorry to see waterstone’s go. It’s a UK chain, but when they opened a 3 1/2 floor bookstore in the old Exeter Theater in Back Bay they instantly outclassed every other bookstore in the city. They opened branches in Quincy Market and Burlington, too. But they closed in only a decade, seeing the handwriting on the wall.
Boston used to be filled with used bookshops, too, most notably the Avenue Victor Hugo bookshop on Newbury Street, gone after it had only been with us for about 20 years.
The DVD and CD shops are closing up fast. In our area the [i[F.Y.E* stores in downtown Boston and in Burlington are closing. I believe the one in Auburn, MA closed quite a while ago, and the one in Meadow Glen Mall in Medford is long gone. The nly one to remain after this month, as far as i can see, is the one in the Natick Collection. With Suncoast Video gone, thast leaves a pretty small field. Thank og for Newbury Comics, which still seems to be going trong in more Boston-area locations than I can recall.
That’s cool. I missed out on ever getting to work with hot metal in my professional career. I came along in time to see a lot of these machines get sent to the scrapyard, which is what motivated me to set up my own shop.
Watch the preview of this movie that comes out next month. I’m not in it. But I know several of the people that are, either directly or through the internets. It’s a film about those of us trying to preserve a lot of this equipment while the operating expertise can still be passed along.
The trophies are more or less a joke. I put my car in a charity car show that was judged by the children of the organizers. I won by taking the kids for (slow) laps around the track between the race sessions. The guitar is just a POS from my college days that I mean to rebuild but never do, having much better ones that don’t need assembly.
I still do calligraphy from time to time. I remember the hands I learned (to the uninitiated: the styles, including such hands as italic, Carolingian, uncial, etc.), I still have my dip pens and nibs, and have a number of beautiful works in my portfolio. I love doing it, though I don’t do it as often as I should.